At the moment, I am truly confused with the current state of my personal Yahoo! account. As a long time end user of Yahoo!, I have recently started to question the accuracy of their inbox filtering system. I no longer receive mail I have subscribed to except on a rare occasion. I do however continue to receive an endless wave of SPAM which is cause for concern. The unfortunate state of my account has raised a very real question – “what has happened to my Yahoo! Inbox?”
As an avid online consumer I have signed up to receive messages from a wide array of leading retail companies. I have always entrusted my account to feed my shopping impulses – knowing I would receive at least two or three messages a day from my favorite retailers. Over the last four months though, my inbox has run amuck with more and more SPAM and fewer and fewer retail messages.
What propelled me to write this post though was the fact that over the last month the havoc in my Yahoo! account has hit an all-time high. I am currently bombarded with unwanted, irrelevant SPAM and no longer receiving the vast majority of the mail I have willingly subscribed to. For example, I have not received a message from HSN in over two and a half weeks or my weekly messages from Toys “R” Us since the beginning of February.
I have enclosed a screen shot of my Yahoo! inbox as of Thursday 2/28. Upon review you will find that I have 22 unread messages of which 20 are pure SPAM. The only two messages received that I have subscribed to are from Newport-news.com and Marketing Profs.
A great example of the SPAM that has consumed my inbox would be the message from eHarmony.com inviting me (a happily married woman with a three and half year old son) to find a Valentine via their dating network on February 29th. This very well known brand is sending me unsolicited mail - I have never subscribed to eHarmony.com. In addition, another cause for concern is that 15 of the messages are marked with a received stamp date that is in the future (for Friday 2/29 and Saturday 3/1).
After viewing my inbox, I wonder how many other consumers feel their Yahoo! account is no longer their own. As an email marketer, I have always maintained my inbox with great care. I take the time and effort to manually check only the messages that are truly SPAM via the Yahoo! SPAM button. I have also been extremely careful not to provide my email address to any sources that state they sell or rent lists.
Deliverability in my Yahoo! account no longer follows any reliable formula. The messages I want to receive are not getting delivered and the messages I really don’t want to receive continue to fool, trick, play… the application.
As an email marketer who truly cares about the functionality of my inbox I am left asking the following questions:
- How can Yahoo! stop SPAM more affectively?
- Has Yahoo! changed their SPAM filters to be too aggressive?
- Is customer behavior affecting deliverability due to customers hitting their SPAM button for all messages?
Kimberly Snyder
Account Manager at Bronto
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Kimberly, one of our members just today was asking about deliverability problems at Yahoo, so it might be a widespread problem. You can see her comments about her experiences here:
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=5218289254&topic=4020
Yeah there were issues yesterday (28) with my Yahoo account as well- and I have BETA. Ended up re-logging into the main portal, and that had a bizarre redesign too. Talk about a clumsy release of a new version- and yes, as a consumer I’m reminded that my mail is not my mail, but some Big Brother hosting it. Probably not the feeling they want!
On another note, neat how they’re showing the GoodMail icon near the messages.
There is a simple solution: Gmail. It works flawlessly for me. SPAM is blocked or segregated into the Junk folder with near perfection. I’ve only had a few sneak through in a couple years time.
Thank you all for your insights. These comments are exactly the conversation I wanted to start around the recent issues I have experienced with my Yahoo Account. I look forward to any additional thoughts and or similar examples.
We have been having this issue for some time now.
There’s been issues with the alt.music.chapel-hill listserv and yahoo as well:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.music.chapel-hill/browse_thread/thread/69b91aa2d6cf08d0/19ea1ab5dc832f5f?lnk=raot
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.music.chapel-hill/browse_thread/thread/530a29f525b9f2ad/58295d6b400a9fef?lnk=gst&q=yahoo#58295d6b400a9fef
My company has been experiencing deliverability problem with Yahoo since January, and the ISP team has been slow in responding. They have responded with a set of questions regarding the number of Yahoo users in my master list and how we manage unsubscription and opt-in sources. It took them over 4 weeks to write back, and I expect another 4 to hear back from them, if at all…