Workarounds for Yahoo email throttling?

Question

My server host has informed me that Yahoo has massively throttled emails send from CiviMail (and thus we may be close to being blacklisted).

I have created a temporary smart group for all yahoo email addresses, to exclude from all mailings for the time being - but obviously just excluding all yahoo recipients forever is not an optimal solution to this problem.

I'm not getting bounces from this list. It's about 20,000 recipients total, about 4k of which are yahoo addresses. We send about 1-3 emails every other week or so.

Does anyone have any ideas on a workaround to maybe throttle the email delivery to Yahoo addresses separately from the rest of our list, or otherwise convince Yahoo that we're not spamming them?

Answer 1

Do you have DKIM keys on your domain? Yahoo and gmail get fed up real quick with poorly structured headers...

You could also switch to a service like sendgrid... and manage your reputation there. They will help you with that. You can also easily set up dkim keys to their server so they can be verified as sending email on your domain's behalf...

Answer 2

An update on this situation.

The realization that we were getting no bounces on this list seemed strange to me - zero bounces seems a little too good to be true. So after much scrounging, I found that gmail has been marking EVERY bounce notification over almost two years as spam - and so they weren't being processed by Civi as bounces. So of course Yahoo hates us - they're telling us we're wasting their time and we're effectively ignoring them.

We've fixed that and processed the notifications that remained in the spam box (only 30 days worth out of two years...yikes). While we work our way back into Yahoo's good graces, we've split out all yahoo addresses into their own mailing group, and then subdivided it into subgroups of about 1000 addresses each, and any time we do a mailing we're excluding the main yahoo group and re-sending it separately to each sub group over several days. It's sub-optimal (and sucks for time-sensitive messages) but is better than being blacklisted.