How does Yahoo Mail filter messages?
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Your IP has a reputation. Your domain has a reputation. And at Yahoo Mail, both of those reputations matter. Yahoo looks at where your email comes from and what people who receive it actually do with it.
Sender reputation. Yahoo tracks your IP and domain history. Have you been sending lots of emails that people mark as spam? Are you on any blocklists? They maintain extensive databases of sender behavior. If you're new or unknown, Yahoo's more skeptical. If you've got clean history, you get the benefit of the doubt.
Authentication. Yahoo was actually one of the companies that helped create DMARC. They care a lot about whether your email is actually from who it claims to be. If you're sending bulk mail, you need SPF and DKIM set up correctly. Without those, Yahoo's filters are skeptical from the start.
User engagement. Here's the part senders sometimes miss. Yahoo watches how recipients actually interact with your emails. Do they open them? Click them? Move them to a folder? How long do they stay in the inbox? All of this feeds into Yahoo's decision about where to put your next email. High engagement means you get inbox. Low engagement means you drift toward spam.
It's worth noting that Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail use the same filtering system now since they merged. So if something works at Yahoo, it works at AOL too.
The next step: check your current sender reputation. Are you on any blocklists? If not, then audit your authentication setup. If those are solid, look at your engagement metrics at Yahoo specifically. Which of your campaigns get high open and click rates there?
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