Verizon announced today that they are buying (most of) Yahoo for 4.8 billion dollars in cash. Back in 2015, they purchased AOL for 4.4 billion dollars. This means that three different email receiving platforms are now owned by one entity: Verizon. It's hard to saay what becomes of the Verizon, AOL and Yahoo! Mail platforms in the future. Since purchasing AOL, Verizon seemed to continue to invest in the AOL mail platform, and some Verizon email users were transitioned to AOL infrastructure. But now that Verizon will own both the AOL and Yahoo! Mail email platforms, both of which I suspect are pretty robust, there could be some internal competition regarding which email platform ends up being the primary one used across all users. Or would they keep both the AOL and Yahoo! Mail platforms running separately? We will see.
TL;DR? Verizon now owns both Yahoo and AOL. Future impact to senders unknown, sit back and stay tuned.
Edited to add: Here's another take on how the consolidation of the two platforms could go, courtesy of Litmus's Chad White.
Spamcop: Declines to send reports to ESPs
If you work the abuse desk for an email service provider, you've undoubtably gotten spam reports from angry Spamcop users who think that your ESP, your employer, is "refusing" Spamcop reports.
Steve's Co-Reg Inbox Saga
Periodically I create a virgin Gmail account and sign it up for something, to see what other kind of stuff might end up in the inbox. On February 22, 2010, I clicked on a single "free ipad" co-reg marketing ad, and left the checkboxes checked. I watched the mail coming in for a while, but then forgot about it.
Wired on Email Reputation
Word to the Wise's Laura Atkins is quoted in this article from Wired, "Mailchimp Sends a Billion Email a Day. That's the Easy Part." It's not a bad primer on Email Reputation 101, and why you can't just shovel spam at ISPs and except them to take it.
Author Klint Finley explains: "What many people don’t realize is that today’s spam filters don’t just scan an email for questionable keywords, like references to pharmaceutical products or porn. Nor do they look merely at the email address of the sender. Crucially, they also look at the servers sending the email. Most of today’s biggest email services, such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook.com, use reputation scoring to rank the likely spamminess of a server that’s sending an email. Think of it as a sort of credit rating for email senders."
Read more >>
Author Klint Finley explains: "What many people don’t realize is that today’s spam filters don’t just scan an email for questionable keywords, like references to pharmaceutical products or porn. Nor do they look merely at the email address of the sender. Crucially, they also look at the servers sending the email. Most of today’s biggest email services, such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook.com, use reputation scoring to rank the likely spamminess of a server that’s sending an email. Think of it as a sort of credit rating for email senders."
Read more >>
Topics:
email reputation,
laura atkins,
mailchimp,
news,
reputation,
wired,
wttw
What is SPF Lockdown?
I've been asked this question pretty regularly: How do I tell the world that a certain domain of mine isn't valid for sending email? What about typo domains, bad domains? How can they configure things to tell the world that no legitimate mail should have this domain in a from address?