As you may remember, Yahoo recently closed email accounts that had been inactive for 12 months and then released them to the public to be used again. At the time, Yahoo took several precautions to maintain user privacy, including sending 30 days of messages notifying the owner that their account would be closed and recycled, and bouncing messages back to senders to let them know that the account had been deactivated.
Along these lines, they’ve introduced a new “Not My Email” option in all email accounts. This will allow a new user to indicate that an email they received was intended for the previous account owner.
What Does This Mean For Your Messages?
It’s like someone moving into a new house and receiving mail addressed to the previous tenant. They didn’t ask for this mail, and they’re not interested in reading it. They want to make sure that the sender knows the old tenant moved out, so they send it back.
This is what happens when the new owner of a recycled Yahoo account selects the “Not My Email” option. And if you are the sender, your email newsletters will get bounced back to you.
It’s Time To Do Some Housekeeping
While very few of these emails may still be on your lists, it’s important to go in and clear old Yahoo addresses from your account. If you didn’t do this before because you’d been hoping to keep the new account owners as subscribers, there are a couple of reasons why this won’t work.
The emails bounced back by the “Not My Email” option will count as a “hard bounce,” and this means in your AWeber account we’ll automatically unsubscribe these addresses from your lists anyway. They also still have the option to report you for spam since they didn’t sign up to receive mail from you. And both bounced emails and spam reports can greatly impact your deliverability.
It’s best to clean up your account now, getting rid of any old Yahoo emails and re-engaging the ones you want to keep. To do so, just follow the steps outlined here.
While You’re At It
Why stop at just Yahoo emails? Search for all subscribers who haven’t opened your mail in a while and reach out to re-engage them. Then, clear any inactive ones from your lists.