By Marcel Becker, Sr Director Product Management

A key mission of Yahoo is to deliver messages that consumers want to receive and filter out the messages they don’t. 

To guide and help senders support us in that mission, we have documented our sending best practices on our Sender Hub. In addition, our postmaster teams have assisted the sending community to achieve the best results for them and ultimately for our users.

Yet, numerous bulk senders fail to secure and set up their systems correctly, allowing malicious actors to exploit their resources without detection. A pivotal aspect of addressing these concerns involves sender validation, leveraging email authentication standards to guarantee the verification of the email sender’s identity. 

Sending properly authenticated messages helps us to better identify and block billions of malicious messages and declutter our users’ inboxes. 

But we believe we can do even more to improve the quality of the emails our users receive as well as fight abuse and ultimately improve the experience for email users everywhere. 

In the first quarter of 2024, we will require that all bulk senders:

• Authenticate their email: To help our users to be more confident about an email’s source, we will require senders to implement stronger email authentication leveraging industry standards such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC. 
  
• Enable Easy Unsubscription: Our users should be able to unsubscribe from unwanted emails without any hassle. It should just take one click. While we have promoted solutions for some time, adoption of these common sense standards have been low. We will require senders to support one-click unsubscribe and honor our users requests within two days. 
  
• Only send emails our users want: True to our key mission, we want to ensure our users’ inboxes are not cluttered with unsolicited or irrelevant emails. While we have measured user reported spam rates for some time and even exposed some of that data for trusted senders, we will start enforcing a threshold to ensure our users can continue to enjoy a spam free mailbox. 
  

While we are announcing these changes for all domains and consumer email brands hosted by Yahoo Mail, we are not alone in our quest to improve the email experience for users anywhere, keeping emails safe, user friendly and spam free. Our industry peers like Google agree with us: 

“We firmly believe that users worldwide deserve a more secure email environment, with fewer unwanted messages for an improved overall experience. We look forward to working with peers across the industry to boost the adoption of these email standards that benefit everyone.” - Neil Kumaran, Group Product Manager, Gmail Security & Trust

In the coming months we will provide more details on our Sender Hub and we can also be reached at mail-questions@yahooinc.com to provide more information or assist with any questions you might have.