by Miriam Moser

Yahoo is Recycling Old Emails

Yahoo is cleaning house. In the next week they are closing down email accounts that have been inactive for 12 months or more, and in the coming months, letting new users take them. What does this mean for you?

Well, it means you may want to purge all inactive Yahoo addresses from your file. Identify all the Yahoo emails on your list that haven’t opened emails in over a year and send them a message with a subject line that lets them know you will be removing them from your list if they do not open. After you’ve given them a few days to react, remove them from your file. If you don’t, you may incur a higher bounce rate, which can affect your future deliverability score with Internet Service Providers.

Some email service providers are being proactive about this and unsubscribing those addresses in advance, but many are leaving it to the customer.

Gmail Adds Tabs

Gmail changes are another matter. If you use Gmail, you may have noticed in the last few weeks that emails are now divided into 3 or more tabs:

So far, all of the nonprofit emails we’ve received have appeared in the promotions tab along with paid ads, making messages easier to ignore. Consider asking your subscribers to move your emails to their primary tab for better visibility.

They can do this simply by dragging an email to a new tab.

Once the email has been placed there, a box pops up and asks you if you want future messages to go there too. The answer is, of course, “Yes”.

If you have Gmail and haven’t tried this yet, we suggest you practice by moving [eJewish Philanthropy] emails into your Primary tab. Then send a similar graphic to your email list!

Miriam Moser is Digital Media Specialist at Amergent.