Why are my emails delayed or not delivering to Yahoo and AOL?

Email marketer from Gmass suggests that sending generic, non-personalized emails are more likely to be flagged as spam. Yahoo and AOL are more likely to filter out mass, impersonal emails. They advise using merge fields and personalized subject lines to increase engagement and improve deliverability.

Marketer from Email Geeks recommends that ESPs could help by automatically limiting the sending rate to Yahoo. However, they also suggest investigating the email list as the root cause of the issue.

Marketer from Email Geeks advises to avoid sending emails at the top or bottom of the hour, as these are typically high-traffic times.

Email marketer from Quora suggests that Yahoo often delays emails from new senders to protect their users from spam. They advise warming up your IP address gradually and building a positive sender reputation by sending to engaged subscribers first. Also, check your domain reputation via Yahoo postmaster tools.

Email marketer from EmailToolTester shares that Yahoo and AOL have stricter DMARC policies. If you are not properly authenticated, your emails are more likely to be delayed or blocked. They advise you to ensure your emails pass SPF and DKIM checks and to align your sending domain with your 'From' address.

Email marketer from Mailjet states that low deliverability to Yahoo and AOL can stem from poor sender reputation, lack of proper authentication (SPF/DKIM), high bounce rates, spam complaints, or sending to inactive email addresses. They emphasize the importance of list hygiene and warming up your IP address.

Email marketer from Reddit mentions that AOL often has stricter filtering based on content, particularly promotional content. Suggests A/B testing different subject lines and email body copy to identify what triggers the spam filters. Also, recommends ensuring a clear unsubscribe link is present.

Email marketer from SenderPulse states that if you are blacklisted the first thing you should do is determine why, and then contact the blacklist to request delisting, once you've fixed the reasons you were blacklisted. Also implement monitoring to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Email marketer from Litmus shares that sending to old, unengaged email addresses harms your sender reputation. High rates of inactive users can signal to ISPs that you're not practicing good list hygiene, leading to deliverability problems. They advise regularly cleaning your list to remove inactive or invalid addresses.

Email marketer from Email Marketing Forum explains that Yahoo and AOL are more likely to flag emails without proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Shares you need to set up these records correctly in your DNS settings to authenticate your sending domain and improve deliverability.

Marketer from Email Geeks shares that Yahoo support suggests "send a lot less" when facing delivery issues.

Expert from Spam Resource recommends adjusting sending times to avoid Yahoo's rate limiting. They suggest pulling back sending times by 8 minutes to distribute mail more evenly and avoid peak sending times.

Expert from Email Geeks suggests that during high volume periods like BF/CM week, email delivery delays can occur depending on infrastructure (shared vs. dedicated). They recommend sending emails at slightly off-peak times (e.g., 9:10 or 8:50 instead of 9:00) to avoid bottlenecks.

Expert from Email Geeks suggests staggering the start times of scheduled Journeys and Automations to avoid default start times like :00, :15, :30, and :45.

Expert from Spam Resource highlights the importance of AOL's feedback loop (FBL) for identifying and addressing deliverability issues. They recommend setting up and monitoring AOL's FBL to track complaint rates and identify problematic campaigns or subscribers impacting your sender reputation. Low complaint rates show good email practice and helps deliverability.

Expert from Email Geeks explains that Yahoo uses temporary failures to manage volume and slow down sending for senders with borderline reputation. These delays might not appear as bounces immediately, as ESPs typically retry for 24-72 hours. Checking email headers for timestamps in the received lines can indicate this issue. Also suggests contacting ESP to figure out root cause.

Expert from Word to the Wise mentions the importance of avoiding content filters and spam traps. They recommends avoiding spam trigger words and images and not sending to harvested lists to avoid being marked as spam by Yahoo and AOL.

Documentation from Postmark explains that factors influencing email deliverability include sender reputation, spam filter triggers (content and subject lines), authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and engagement metrics (opens, clicks). Low engagement or high complaint rates can lead to deliverability issues.

Documentation from SparkPost explains that being listed on a blocklist (e.g., Spamhaus, Barracuda) can severely impact deliverability to all email providers, including Yahoo and AOL. This is because blocklists flag IP addresses or domains known for sending spam. They advise regularly checking if your sending IPs/domains are blocklisted and taking steps to delist if necessary.

Documentation from Google Postmaster Tools explains that using these tools you can monitor sender reputation, spam rates and authentication status. By monitoring and actioning any items here, that will ultimately give good insight to deliverability and ways to fix it.

Documentation from Microsoft explains that sender reputation, based on factors like complaint rates and spam trap hits, significantly impacts deliverability. Low reputation can lead to emails being filtered as spam or blocked entirely. They advise monitoring your reputation using feedback loops and postmaster tools.

Documentation from RFC regarding SMTP highlights that temporary failures (4xx errors) indicate a transient problem that might resolve itself. These can cause delays as the sending server will attempt to retry delivery later. These could indicate temporary issues at the receiver end (Yahoo/AOL), such as server overload or maintenance.