Over the weekend, Yahoo implemented a change to their email services which may be causing some major problems. The changes implemented essentially told all email companies, including Hotmail, Gmail, AOL and others, that any email that comes from a Yahoo.com email address should be bounced back as undeliverable if they fail a certain test. The test that is causing the problem is whether or not the server sending the email matches the domain in the email address.
So, if someone has their email marketing software to send out from their normal @yahoo.com address, it will fail this test. The server will be owned by the email marketing company, but the from address will be the @yahoo.com, causing problems.
To make matters worse, many email marketing services remove addresses from lists when they bounce back as undeliverable. This means that not only could people be missing out on marketing emails of all types because of this, but they could actually be removed from lists entirely, reducing the income opportunities of thousands of marketers who use Yahoo email.
There have already been dozens of complaints by businesses on the Yahoo Answers site, as well as other locations across the web. People are upset, and with good reason, that their marketing messages aren’t getting through. What is, perhaps, worse, however, is that other businesses emails may bounce back as well. For example, if someone makes a purchase from a business that uses Yahoo, they may not get their receipt or download instructions. They may even be missing a shipping confirmation.
There is no way to predict how far reaching this issue could be, and it doesn’t seem like it will be getting fixed anytime soon. Yahoo hasn’t made any announcement that this is an error, and it may actually be functioning as they intended.
At this time, the only way to ensure this problem doesn’t continue is to adjust the email address that is being used by the email marketing service. Moving to an @gmail.com account, for example, should take care of the issue. Of course, changing emails is not exactly good customer service, so make sure to notify customers of the change.
