Although it’s probably been this way for a while I’m finally starting to focus more on Newsletter delivery for a couple of our properties and we’ve noticed consistent problems for anyone signing up with a Yahoo address.
We use Mailpoet for our newsletter distribution and it appears that a lot of Yahoo addresses never conform their subscription (despite being seemingly genuine accounts. We’ve had readers complain that they’re not getting any mail). For those who successfully confirm their emails they almost always bounce as ‘spam’.
We’re guessing this is just Yahoo being a dick and not implementing whitelisting measures when someone confirms, perhaps due to adult content in the newsletters.
Does anyone know of this problem and has anyone discovered a way around it? We’re contemplating adding something to the sign up forms to alert people not to use Yahoo, because there’s no point, they probably won’t get the newsletter anyway.
I’ve had problems with the “free services” of providers like Mailpoet and Sendgrid. Unless you have a paid subscription with them and buy a private IP address you will get poor delivery to yahoo and others.
Right now I am using Amazon AWS Simple Email Service (SES) and API. You can do this with sendy for about $1.00 / 10,000 emails.
You could use phpList to send the newsletters from your own server. It’s basically an open source version of the paid services.
I switched over to MojoHost middle of last year (very happy I made the move). When I said I needed to send emails they unexpectedly set up SMTP on my server. That let me set up full DKIM/SPF/DMARC for my outgoing email which was a major improvement in terms of having my emails trusted by all the various services. I’m now responsible for everything that’s sent from my server. I monitor things pretty closely to make sure I’m not having reputation problems, and also use MXToolbox’s free service to get regular reports about whether I get onto any email blacklists. So far so good. (If you go that route, let me know and I’ll give you some pointers of what I’ve learned.)
Anyway, I do get my emails through to Yahoo! but they’re transactional, not bulk. Also, I’ve noticed Yahoo! rate-limits email from small email servers. I notice in the mail log it will say it will refuse emails saying I’ve hit my limit and to try again later. I can see where if you’re sending in bulk only a few would get through and then it would be a trickle after that. Or they could just block you completely if your server was aggressive about resending. In other words, with Yahoo! you can only send really small batches. When you hit a limit you have to back off and not send more until the current batch is fully accepted.