Do you send ReachMail campaigns from …@yahoo.com?
If you do then you need to know that Yahoo has made some major technical changes that will affect your campaign performances. If you do not send your ReachMail mailings from a Yahoo address, you are not affected by this change.
Over the weekend Yahoo changed it’s DMARC (email routing/authentication) policy from NONE to REJECT. What does that mean? In short, it means that any mail sent from a @yahoo.com address but not routed through Yahoo’s SMTP servers was rejected by receivers who respect DMARC.
In short – you’ll have to use a different from email address than @yahoo.com from now on. ReachMail recommends that you register a domain for use when sending mail. If you already have a website, consider using that domain when sending. As a reminder, you will be prompted to change your From address when editing a message using a @yahoo.com address
How does this affect me?
If you try to send your ReachMail mailings from a @yahoo.com address your mail will be rejected (bounced). Mailings sent through an ESP such as ReachMail will flow out through that’s ESPs domains and IP address. This change is affecting all ESPs, not just ReachMail. Though we authenticate your messages as being part of our mail network, we cannot authenticate them as part of Yahoo’s mail network.
Why did Yahoo do this?
There’s no official word at this time but it appears to be related to a large on-going attack on Yahoo users attempting to compromise their accounts and use them for sending spam.
Will Yahoo change their policy?
It’s unclear if Yahoo will restore their old policy.
What is DMARC?
The full technical specifications of Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) are too complex to cover in this article but the DMARC goal is to provide another layer of anti-spam / -phishing technology by allowing domain owners to publish a policy for handling mail from their domain that doesn’t match their SPF and DKIM records. In other words, the owner of acme-inc.com can publish a policy telling mailbox providers to reject all mail in which the from domain doesn’t match the domain value DKIM signature of the message and / or the SPF domain does not match. DMARC seeks to establish the relationship between the domain in the From header of the message and the message authentication.
DMARC is primarily intended as a tool for sender’s whose domains are frequently forged by phishers / spammers such as PayPal, Ebay, banks, etc.
We understand that this can be a confusing topic, please contact support@reachmail.com if you have any questions.