Is Yahoo still delivering the messages that matter?

With years of experience tracking email delivery for Cumulo9, Alan Page has seen the best and worst of the inbox world. In our latest blog, he turns the spotlight on Yahoo to ask a crucial question: are Kiwi and Aussie users still getting the messages that matter? 

Having become involved in the email business sometime after the initial advent of “public” e-mail services, the influences from the early days of e-mail in New Zealand and Australia are of particular interest to us here at Cumulo9, and I have been following developments closely over the years. The number of local recipients using Hotmail, Yahoo and Xtra addresses - in favour of the industry leader, Google (who host almost half of the ‘public’ inboxes we regularly deliver to) - is a unique characteristic of the Kiwi internet landscape, borne out of the dominance of the industry by Spark (Telecom at the time) at the dawn of the ISP mailbox hosting era. This pattern is in some ways mirrored in the makeup of the Australian market, where the initial dial-up and mailbox packages from Telstra see a predominance of Bigpond and affiliated domains in the makeup of email address distribution when sending essential email mailouts across the ditch. 

Major shifts in the local email landscape

Amongst all the changes we’ve seen in the New Zealand market over the past 25 years, one of the most important in a local context is Spark’s shifting of xtra.co.nz addresses from white labelled Yahoo mailboxes to local supplier SMX between September 2016 and April 2017. Followed on May 16, 2024, by their levying of charges for access to Xtra addresses - $5.95 a month for those who are customers of the company, and $9.95 for those who are not. 

I suspect very few people who were not active Spark customers would have taken up that offer. I cannot imagine many people would be willing to pay for a mailbox when there are free options such as Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. 

Also significant was the closure of TelstraClear (clear.net.nz, paradise.net.nz) and Vodafone (vodafone.co.nz) mailboxes by Vodafone on 30 November 2017 – it appears most users of Vodafone’s email services moved to either Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook as suggested by Vodafone during the shutdown period. 

What the data tells us

As a member of the team that produces Cumulo9’s annual Essential Emails Insights report, I am privy to some fascinating data on where emails are being sent within New Zealand and Australia, although some recipients have mailboxes that are hosted on international domains, particularly within the Asia Pacific region. 

There have been several changes to mailbox providers within the region over the past two decades and the most recent major upheaval for e-mail is the vigorous application of modern authentication and security practices by the major players in the industry. Now that SPF DKIM and to some degree DMARC are required for delivery of any e-mail to the major providers the landscape has changed significantly. 

Improvements in delivery with modern authentication 

As a trusted sender on behalf of our clients, we are seeing improved delivery rates in recent times as our services fully comply with the requirements of the major mailbox hosts. 

At least two of the bigger players, being Microsoft and Gmail, have invested heavily in creating smart systems to identify valid, authenticated and legitimate emails while excluding spam and phishing attempts. These investments include the application of AI to rapidly scan inbound messages and identify patterns and compliance. AI is also employed to monitor users' mailbox behaviour and their interaction with messages. If a user regularly opens messages of a certain type from a specific sender, all future messages of the same ilk will be delivered directly to their inbox. 

That being said, for non-essential emails such as marketing messages, the promotions tab within Gmail is not the graveyard that some marketers might believe. Correctly configured, messages of this type can benefit from being within the promotions tab where key aspects may be highlighted by Gmail to encourage users to interact with the message and potentially complete a transaction.

Where Yahoo is falling behind 

The one mailbox provider that seems to have fallen behind in recent times is Yahoo. While their postmaster is amenable and usually resolves issues such as grey listing on request, it appears that their systems are now outdated and have an archaic approach to e-mail filtering. 

We have seen an increase in the number of messages that fail to deliver to Yahoo users despite being retried several times over an extended period, due to Yahoo's grey listing practices. The same essential e-mail messages have been delivered successfully on the same schedule from the same IP addresses for the past decade or more. We have not seen this behaviour from any of the other large mailbox providers. 

Recent delivery challenges

Thanks to careful configuration of all authentication protocols, on a recent send for a newly onboarded client using brand new IP addresses, all emails to Gmail and Microsoft domains, as well as most other privately hosted or smaller domains, were completed without issue. Only Yahoo and BigPond were unable or unwilling to accept the vast majority of these clearly essential email messages for delivery to their clients. 

Around the time of this particular event, we also noted an outage at Yahoo, with users complaining that they were unable to access messages from the past three days. What concerns me is - was this purely an issue with the users' mailboxes, or is it a symptom of the fact that Yahoo is rejecting messages that they should be accepting? 

If it is the latter, are Yahoo users aware that they are potentially missing vital correspondence from businesses throughout New Zealand and Australia? Some of these relate to accounts due for payment, rates, tax obligations and/or payslips. 

If Yahoo is rejecting legitimate emails, how do their customers know? 

In many cases, it appears some customers have had Yahoo addresses for an extended period and may only use them for login access to specific accounts or because they've provided them to contacts in the past. Though the numbers we see when analysing delivery data indicate there is a large group of people who rely on Yahoo as their main mailbox for delivery of vital communications (as that is all we at Cumulo9 deliver via our C9 Transact platform). 

For those customers who do rely on Yahoo as their main mailbox, there should be real disquiet about the messages they are expecting and require, which are being rejected or fail due to grey listing. Is it simply a capacity issue that Yahoo cannot accept the volume of emails being sent to their domain, or is it a case of not being able to adapt to the new environment, which they, in many ways, helped create? And to be fair to Yahoo, they were a pioneer and major player in the new security and authentication standards (particularly DKIM), it's just that the other players have leapfrogged them. 

Still using Yahoo? We’d love to hear your experience — have you noticed missed messages, or is your inbox running smoothly? Share your story with us.