Policy change may be affecting your email deliverability

Yahoo, and AOL have taken up war against fraudulent emails by updating their DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) authentication policy. This new policy targets emails suspected for spreading fraud or spam by stopping any personal yahoo.com or AOL.com mail address that doesn’t originate from their servers.

This may seem like great progress in stopping those pesky spam messages from building up in your inbox (and it is!), but a darker side comes along with the good.

Using an email service provider such as MailChimp with a Yahoo or AOL address will now prevent any of your emails and marketing campaigns from being sent. While your message is clearly not fraudulent, their company servers will not recognize it as such. If you also have been in the routine of using another email service to send mail from a separate email (using Gmail to send Yahoo addressed mail), then you also will be experiencing this traffic jam. The servers will recognize your address as not coming directly from their server and it will immediately be blocked from being sent or taken straight to the spam folder.

How can you avoid this headache? The most valid response to making sure your emails and campaigns are sent without problem is to change your email service provider. Changing over to another free provider such as Gmail or Hotmail may seem like the best idea—but that may not be the smartest decision down the line. While Yahoo and AOL are currently the only two providers to make this change known, there is no guarantee that other providers won’t quickly follow suit. With this obstacle in the way, the best option is to create or use your own personal email domain, such as example@yourdomain.com.

Despite the lack of warning, Yahoo and AOL’s decision to implement this change will be beneficial for everyone. Be sure to check your email reports now and in the future to make sure this change isn’t negatively impacting you.