Yahoo has long had a very useful portal for email senders, chock full of important information, known as the Yahoo Sender Hub. It's where savvy email senders go when troubleshooting email deliverability issues relating to sending to Yahoo subscribers, including where you go to register your email domains for the Yahoo Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL), their version of an ISP feedback loop. The website also details deliverability best practices, bulk email sender requirements, and shares SMTP deferral and rejection code information necessary for decoding 4xx and 5xx error responses.
And now they've added something new to share with you: Insights. Insights tells you two very important things: Your spam complaint rate, and your inbox-delivered email volume, all based on DKIM authenticated email messages for domains registered with Yahoo Mail.
Insight 1: Spam Complaint Rate
First, the complaint rate. This is a "true" complaint rate that likely will differ from your own ESP's reporting. Yahoo's rate is calculated using only messages that reach the inbox as the denominator. Now you're seeing the spam complaint rate exactly the way that Yahoo Mail is.
Your ESP's numbers will definitely not match this exactly; which destination domains are included? Are all complaints being sent back to the sender platform via the CFL? Time zone and date range differences on either end, too. These all add complexity to the math. Continue to trust your ESP's complaint rate information as a directional indicator to determine bad sends or bad segments (or bad clients, if you're in compliance), but consider the Yahoo Mail data as the source of truth, especially from Yahoo's perspective.
The enforcement and warning thresholds are quite handy, too. Right there, easily visible; you know that if you've over .1% by their data, you're heading towards trouble, and if you're at .3% or worse, expect to see that trouble very soon, if not already.
Savvy senders will want to use this valuable feedback to focus deliverability remediation efforts as needed.
Insight 2: Delivered Volume
Next, the delivered volume. Handy to know; it's Yahoo showing the math on that complaint rate metric as described above. If you're particularly savvy, you might be able to use this to roughly estimate inbox placement percentage. (Note that Yahoo's end of this is based on email message delivery attempts to any email domains that they host on their Yahoo Mail infrastructure; this is NOT just mail to yahoo.com.)
Quick Need-to-Knows
To see data, your domain must be added and verified in your Sender Hub account. You don't have to sign up for the Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL) service, but the existing registration process for a domain allows you access into both the CFL and Insights functionality. If you're the right kind of savvy sender, or you manage complaint handling, you'll want to also register your domains for the CFL.
After your initial request to participate in Insights, it'll take a day or two for data to begin to populate. A minimum email send volume is required for data to populate for a given day, though they're not saying exactly what that threshold is. The time zone for data displayed is UTC.
There's no API access today, but be sure to let Yahoo know if you'd like to see this in the future (I definitely would).
Getting started with Yahoo Insights is easy. Just go to the Yahoo Sender Hub dashboard and look for the Insights section. For DKIM domains you've already registered with Yahoo Mail, you'll see an "activate" button along with text that says, "Activate to view data for your domain. See if your domain complies with the spam complaint rate enforcement threshold." After you click the Activate button, data will appear after a day or two.
If you'd like to register new or additional domains, make your way to the domains tab under your Sender Hub account overview. Select "add a domain" and walk through the process to "Add DKIM Domain," which involves copying and pasting a bit of text (starting with "yahoo-verification-key=") into DNS for your domain to verify ownership. After verifying your domain, you'll be able to "activate" it as described above.
Thinking About the Future
I have no clue if Yahoo plans to add additional data to Insights at some point in the future. I hope they do! And I hope that you find what they've shared so far to be valuable. Showing Yahoo that good senders consider the Insights data to be useful seems like an important next step toward convincing them to add additional features in the future. Be sure to check out Insights, bring it into your email deliverability workflow, and share your feedback with Yahoo.
Yahoo has long had a very useful portal for email senders, chock full of important information, known as the Yahoo Sender Hub. It's where savvy email senders go when troubleshooting email deliverability issues relating to sending to Yahoo subscribers, including where you go to register your email domains for the Yahoo Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL), their version of an ISP feedback loop. The website also details deliverability best practices, bulk email sender requirements, and shares SMTP deferral and rejection code information necessary for decoding 4xx and 5xx error responses.
And now they've added something new to share with you: Insights. Insights tells you two very important things: Your spam complaint rate, and your inbox-delivered email volume, all based on DKIM authenticated email messages for domains registered with Yahoo Mail.
Insight 1: Spam Complaint Rate
First, the complaint rate. This is a "true" complaint rate that likely will differ from your own ESP's reporting. Yahoo's rate is calculated using only messages that reach the inbox as the denominator. Now you're seeing the spam complaint rate exactly the way that Yahoo Mail is.Your ESP's numbers will definitely not match this exactly; which destination domains are included? Are all complaints being sent back to the sender platform via the CFL? Time zone and date range differences on either end, too. These all add complexity to the math. Continue to trust your ESP's complaint rate information as a directional indicator to determine bad sends or bad segments (or bad clients, if you're in compliance), but consider the Yahoo Mail data as the source of truth, especially from Yahoo's perspective.
The enforcement and warning thresholds are quite handy, too. Right there, easily visible; you know that if you've over .1% by their data, you're heading towards trouble, and if you're at .3% or worse, expect to see that trouble very soon, if not already.
Insight 2: Delivered Volume
Next, the delivered volume. Handy to know; it's Yahoo showing the math on that complaint rate metric as described above. If you're particularly savvy, you might be able to use this to roughly estimate inbox placement percentage. (Note that Yahoo's end of this is based on email message delivery attempts to any email domains that they host on their Yahoo Mail infrastructure; this is NOT just mail to yahoo.com.)Quick Need-to-Knows
To see data, your domain must be added and verified in your Sender Hub account. You don't have to sign up for the Complaint Feedback Loop (CFL) service, but the existing registration process for a domain allows you access into both the CFL and Insights functionality. If you're the right kind of savvy sender, or you manage complaint handling, you'll want to also register your domains for the CFL.After your initial request to participate in Insights, it'll take a day or two for data to begin to populate. A minimum email send volume is required for data to populate for a given day, though they're not saying exactly what that threshold is. The time zone for data displayed is UTC.
There's no API access today, but be sure to let Yahoo know if you'd like to see this in the future (I definitely would).
Got More Questions? Check the FAQ.
Getting Started with Yahoo Insights
Getting started with Yahoo Insights is easy. Just go to the Yahoo Sender Hub dashboard and look for the Insights section. For DKIM domains you've already registered with Yahoo Mail, you'll see an "activate" button along with text that says, "Activate to view data for your domain. See if your domain complies with the spam complaint rate enforcement threshold." After you click the Activate button, data will appear after a day or two.If you'd like to register new or additional domains, make your way to the domains tab under your Sender Hub account overview. Select "add a domain" and walk through the process to "Add DKIM Domain," which involves copying and pasting a bit of text (starting with "yahoo-verification-key=") into DNS for your domain to verify ownership. After verifying your domain, you'll be able to "activate" it as described above.
Thinking About the Future
I have no clue if Yahoo plans to add additional data to Insights at some point in the future. I hope they do! And I hope that you find what they've shared so far to be valuable. Showing Yahoo that good senders consider the Insights data to be useful seems like an important next step toward convincing them to add additional features in the future. Be sure to check out Insights, bring it into your email deliverability workflow, and share your feedback with Yahoo.Comments
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