Gmail and Yahoo are two of today’s most used email platforms. When these organizations release information regarding their email functionality, it’s important for everyone to listen, not just those who have Yahoo or Gmail email addresses.

Both organizations are making some changes in their processes or formats. Make note of how these changes may affect you and what you should consider doing about it.

Yahoo

Yahoo is recycling its old email addresses. In the very near future email accounts that have been inactive for 12+ months will be closed down. Those closed accounts can then be picked up by new users. This will affect many companies because there is no automatic way of knowing when an address has switched users. Companies may go from sending relevant information to an opted-in user to sending useless information to an uninterested user without even knowing.

So what should you do?

Identify all the Yahoo email addresses that you contact who haven’t opened emails from you in the last year. Send a message alerting them that if they do not respond to this email, they will be removed from your list. Allow a couple of days for a response. If you do not receive one, remove the email from your list. This will decrease bounce rates and potential spam reporting.

Gmail

Gmail has added tabs to some accounts as a way of sorting through its mess. Paid ads, spam mail, and other generally unwanted emails will appear in the “Promotions” tab so that it is easier for users to filter out unwanted emails. The problem is that Gmail may sometimes group important emails with unwanted emails in that Promotions tab. This means that when you send an email blast to prospects or clients, a number of them will not even see it, let alone read it, because it is automatically placed in the Promotions tab.

So what should you do?

Be sure to ask all of your subscribers who use Gmail to move your emails from the Promotions tab to their primary tab to ensure that they receive everything you send. When a user moves one email, Gmail will ask if they want future messages from that sender to go there as well. If they click yes, all future emails you send out will be safely delivered to your recipient.

Hopefully this brief summary of what is taking place with email for these two organizations helps you to avoid potential issues that their changes could cause.