By Marcel Becker, Director Product Management

The mail teams at Oath are always looking at new ideas and features to enhance our consumer mail products we offer under the Yahoo and AOL brands. Our goal is to build the best mail experience for our users helping them to manage their mailboxes. While we strive to be the leader in that space, we realize that there are a lot of opportunities to collaborate with our friends and partners in the industry. We constantly work with other mail providers and senders on making email more secure as well as identifying opportunities which will help all of us to provide an even better experience for all consumers.

One such initiative is called BIMI, which is short for Brand Indicators for Message Identification. It provides a standard way for companies to publish their brand logos online, in order to improve confidence and trust between application users and brands. Mail applications like Yahoo Mail may then leverage those logos to display them alongside messages.

By creating a standard that ensures the correct brand logo is displayed, BIMI improves on the tools currently used by Yahoo Mail and others by putting control back in the hands of brands.

In addition to the benefits to brands, users using applications showing BIMI logos can be sure to trust emails accompanied by their official brand indicator.

As displaying a BIMI logo requires the sender to authenticate their emails using DMARC to prevent spoofing, we hope it will encourage even more senders to leverage those standards and increase overall email security and reduce phishing.

Starting this week Oath will join a pilot, which will show BIMI logos of participating brands in our Yahoo Mail apps on the desktop as well as on mobile devices.

Visit the working group site at https://bimigroup.org for more information about the proposed standard and how to join the pilot.

You may also reach out directly to us personally at mail-questions@verizonmedia.com.

By Marcel Becker, Director Product Management

The mail team at Oath is busy integrating Yahoo and AOL technologies to deliver an even better experience across all our consumer mail products. While privacy and security are top priorities for us, we also want to improve the experience across all of our products.

Starting this week we will be serving images in email via our own proxy servers. This will not only increase speed and security for our mail products, reduce the risk of phishing and other scams. This also means that our users don’t have to fiddle around with those “enable images” settings and see emails the way they were meant to be seen. Messages and inline images will now just show up as originally intended.

We are aware that commercial mail senders are relying on images (so-called pixels) to track delivery and open rates. Our proxy solution will continue to support most of these cases and ensure that true mail opens are recorded.

For senders serving dynamic content based on the recipient’s location (received from standard IP-based browser and app capabilities and not our products) we recommend falling back on other tools and technologies which do not rely on IP-based targeting.

All of our consumers (Yahoo and AOL) will benefit from this change. This includes our desktop as well as our mobile products across iOS and Android.

If you have any feedback, issues or want to discuss those changes with us personally, just send us a note to mail-questions@oath.com.

P.S.: Note that we are still testing and tweaking that implementation, so as always keep in mind: individual results and mileage will vary!

By Lili Crowley, Postmaster 

While we continue to merge the AOL and Yahoo infrastructure under the OATH umbrella, we wanted to share an update on how this will affect DMARC and FBL reporting.

As we work through updating our MX records, domains which will point to the new record will cease to produce DMARC reports coming from the AOL side. Instead they will now be included in the reports currently produced by Yahoo. We will improve those as well over the next weeks while we work towards our goal of starting the actual mailbox migration.

Once that migration has started, FBL reports will change as well. While AOL mailboxes are still served by the AOL infrastructure, FBL reports will continue to come from the AOL side. Once a mailbox has been migrated, FBL reports will come from Yahoo. So we recommend subscribing to both while we consolidate our infrastructure.

We’ll share more as we progress through this project. If you encounter any issues, don’t hesitate and reach out to our postmaster team at https://postmaster.aol.com.

By Lili Crowley, Postmaster

As AOL and Yahoo come together under the OATH umbrella, we will merge the mail infrastructure serving our consumer brands.

As a first step, starting this week, the majority of AOL’s MX records will point to our new combined servers. This should be transparent to any sender as those servers will operate in simple pass-through mode. This means senders with established FBLs will continue to receive them from our AOL mail infrastructure.

While we do not foresee any issues, you are welcome to reach out to the AOL postmaster team at https://postmaster.aol.com if you should encounter anything.

Over the next few months we will continue to make adjustments as we further combine our systems. Watch this space for additional notes in the future.