Sending emails to your @yahoo subscribers should be a piece of cake right? You just whip up a campaign, click send and voila! Happiness all around.

Well ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) like Yahoo have some pretty heavy duty email filtering algorithms in place. These filters help them manage the earth rumbling amounts of email that come crashing into their servers each and every day (a number that’s increasing exponentially at astounding rates).

So, is there anything that you can do to get on Yahoo’s good side? Something to help to ensure that your email blasts to yahoo subscribers actually reach them in a timely manner?

Yep, there sure is.

But before we jump into those let’s discuss throttling…

So what is throttling?

Some ISP’s like Yahoo will limit the amount of email they accept and receive from senders for a certain time period. This refusal to receive messages is usually temporary.

Email throttling is normal. Each ISP has their own in-house thresholds. If you follow deliverability best practices, over time you won’t have to worry too much about email throttling.

Does Yahoo throttle inbound email?

Yahoo definitely throttles the amount of emails that are hitting their servers.

Why would Yahoo throttle my email?

There’s a bunch of reasons why Yahoo would throttle the emails that are coming into their network. The two biggest are to fight spam and manage their server resources.

There’s a couple key factors as to why emails would be throttled by Yahoo:

• Unknown “From” email address

• Your campaign has received some spam complaints (not enough for yahoo to block you) and the receiving server wants to slow down the process to see how the remaining recipients respond to your message

• The recipients mailbox is full

• Yahoo prioritizes email with a bias on 1:1 messaging. Meaning that if they have a que of emails ready to come into their network they look for messages that are sent between friends/family first and give priority to those

• The type of content you’re sending is questionable in a questionable niche

• Your sending volume is high

• You sending frequency is inconsistent

User Engagement

It’s also been reported that Yahoo monitors your subscribers engagement with your campaigns across their network. So if you’re not sending out quality content that your subscribers are eager to receive, open and click on, Yahoo notices.

Email Throttling Prevention Strategies

Here at MyBizMailer we are continually tweaking our server settings to ensure optimal delivery to all the ISP’s.

So here’s some things that you can do to help boost your deliverability to Yahoo:

• Send your emails earlier (that way all your emails can be sent by the time you want them to hit your subscribers inboxes)

• Use a consistent “From” email address and name for your campaigns

• Try and make your from email address a domain based one (i.e. newsletter@yourdomain.com – avoid using free email service provider emails like @yahoo.com)

• Consistently send out your campaigns at regular intervals (minimize the amount of times you randomly blast your list)

• Segment your email lists by domain (creating a new list that only has yahoo subscribers on it – ymail, rocketmail, and even rogers.com are on the yahoo network)

• Always include a plain-text version of your email campaign

• Minimize your bounce rates

To Wrap Things Up

Who would’ve thought that sending an email could have so many moving parts? And this is exactly why we wanted to give you the knowledge and tactics you’ll need to be successful at it. 

Check out the additional resource below as well.

Additional Deliverability Resources:

Best Practices for Sending to Yahoo

(It's Not Really About Percentages) The Number of Spam Complaints You Receive Matter

Content Based Filtering