Yahoo Mail Blacklists a Respected White Hat
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Randy Cassingham, who writes the longstanding and popular This is True (the first for-profit e-mail publication, by the way), has had his double opt-in newsletter blocked by Yahoo.
This is big stuff for a list of Cassingham’s size, as Yahoo addresses represent more than 20,000 of his subscribers, and the majority can’t receive emails they’ve opted-in and confirmed they wish to receive.
“As of now, about 70 percent of the Yahoo addresses are blocked. That’s more than 15,000 folks. That’s more than 10 percent of my entire distribution. And that’s catastrophic: it has the potential to kill True’s newsletter. Nearly 15 percent of my audience, as of this week, which means 15 percent of my revenue, including 15 percent of my ad revenue, has suddenly stopped. It’s the biggest crisis in True’s more than 14 years online. And it’s (sigh) right in the middle of a worldwide economic slowdown. What lovely timing.”
The reason for this whole mess is that some of the subscribers to This is True clicked that the newsletter was spam, rather than simply unsubscribing.
But why should you care? Well, if you’ve got an email list, you could be crushed by the same misguided policy.
Randy has been putting out This is True since 1994, and he’s been a clean emailer.
I’d urge any legitimate emailers to bring some attention to this matter – Digg it, blog about it, spread the news on Twitter, talk about it on a podcast.
And go to This is True to subscribe. It’s a very entertaining email that goes out once a week.
Don’t be the next email publisher to get whacked by these Draconian rules that result from newbie ignorance.
- Posted in Affiliate Managers, Affiliate News, Affiliate Opinions
4 Comments
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On August 8 @ 7:02 am posted[...] Shawn Collins, “Yahoo Mail Blacklists a Respected White Hat”, Affiliate Tip, August 2, 20…, Randy Cassingham’s This Is True blog Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social [...]
Totally agree here. This needs to be clarified. Randy runs a great newsletter and Yahoo! is not thinking clearly here. Nice way to continue to destroy your brand Yahoo! Why should anyone pay attention to you if this is the way you're going to treat the good businesses? Doesn't make sense.
reply to this commentYahoo! has been “grey-listing” (a lot of) bulk email for several weeks now. If you have a yahoo! email account, you may have scrolled back down into your inbox to discover a message that came in at say, Noon, that was NOT there before. Essentially, they are grey-listing by deferring delivery of bulk email messages and asking you to re-send after four hours. If you check your SMTP logs, you will likely see a message something like this:
421 4.7.0 [TS01] Messages from [Mail Server IP Address] temporarily deferred due to user complaints – 4.16.55.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts01.html
Just don't get me started on the Yahoo! > Rhapsody migration.
I hope this helps!
reply to this commentYahoo! has been “grey-listing” (a lot of) bulk email for several weeks now. If you have a yahoo! email account, you may have scrolled back down into your inbox to discover a message that came in at say, Noon, that was NOT there before. Essentially, they are grey-listing by deferring delivery of bulk email messages and asking you to re-send after four hours. If you check your SMTP logs, you will likely see a message something like this:
421 4.7.0 [TS01] Messages from [Mail Server IP Address] temporarily deferred due to user complaints – 4.16.55.1; see http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts01.html
Just don't get me started on the Yahoo! > Rhapsody migration.
I hope this helps!
reply to this comment