OT: Yahoo! e-mail help needed

[retired711]

My wife is a member of an organization that sends out a *lot* of e-mail. Up until now, it has come to my e-mail address. But I am so overwhelmed by its volume that we've agreed to switch it to her yahoo! e-mail address. But the organization tells me that e-mail sent to her email address comes back to them with a "bounced as suspended" message. This seems weird because lots of e-mail from other organizations and senders gets to her in-box without a problem.

I have a theory. The organization bcc's its members on e-mails. My understanding is that e-mail systems sometimes treat messages with multiple bcc's as spam. But I also notice that for the past few weeks neither my Yahoo! or her Yahoo! email account has had anything in the spam folder. This makes me think that when Yahoo! sees a questionable message, it bounces it rather than send it to spam. That in turn makes me wonder whether there is something in the settings that is causing this. I would appreciate any thoughts about how to solve this problem. Thanks in advance!

P.S. I went to the settings in my wife's e-mail. She does not have any blocked addresses.

P.P.S.She uses the free version of Yahoo! email.

P.P.P.S. My wife has a lot of e-mails in her box, but this doesn't seem to stop any other incoming e-mail.

 

[Barnaby&Neill]

Did you confirm they sent to the right email address?

If so, your wife should add the sender’s email address as a contact in her account.

However, there still may be a delay before your wife receives emails as her address may be suspended for some period of time by the service the sender is using.

 

[retired711]

Did you confirm they sent to the right email address?

If so, your wife should add the sender’s email address as a contact in her account.

However, there still may be a delay before your wife receives emails as her address may be suspended for some period of time by the service the sender is using.

Thanks for responding. If I understand you right, the sender's service may have suspended my wife, although I really can't imagine why. I'm looking at her yahoo settings and I can't see how one makes an email address a contact. All I see is an option to import contacts from yahoo, gmail, aol, and outlook. I hope you have thoughts on how to solve this.

 

[Barnaby&Neill]

Thanks for responding. If I understand you right, the sender's service may have suspended my wife, although I really can't imagine why. I'm looking at her yahoo settings and I can't see how one makes an email address a contact. All I see is an option to import contacts from yahoo, gmail, aol, and outlook. I hope you have thoughts on how to solve this.

For why it might be suspended, google:“soft bounces constant contact.”

For contact creation:
Add a brand new contact

1. From Yahoo Mail, click the Contacts icon
   
   .
2. Click the All tab.
3. Click Add a new contact.
4. Enter the contact's info.
5. Click Save.

Add a contact from email​

1. From Yahoo Mail, open an email.
2. Mouse over the sender's name or email address to display the contact card.
3. Click Add to contacts.
4. Enter the contact's info.
5. Click Save.

 

[retired711]

For why it might be suspended, google:“soft bounces constant contact.”

For contact creation:
Add a brand new contact

1. From Yahoo Mail, click the Contacts icon
   
   .
2. Click the All tab.
3. Click Add a new contact.
4. Enter the contact's info.
5. Click Save.

Add a contact from email​

1. From Yahoo Mail, open an email.
2. Mouse over the sender's name or email address to display the contact card.
3. Click Add to contacts.
4. Enter the contact's info.
5. Click Save.

thank you! I have created a contact on her account and we will see how that works.

I am still wondering, however, why the e-mails are being bounced rather than sent to spam. This is happening with my account: when I open my spa folder there are no messages there even if it's been days or weeks since I last opened the folder.

Thanks again!

 

[Big East Beast]

My wife is a member of an organization that sends out a *lot* of e-mail. Up until now, it has come to my e-mail address. But I am so overwhelmed by its volume that we've agreed to switch it to her yahoo! e-mail address. But the organization tells me that e-mail sent to her email address comes back to them with a "bounced as suspended" message. This seems weird because lots of e-mail from other organizations and senders gets to her in-box without a problem.

I have a theory. The organization bcc's its members on e-mails. My understanding is that e-mail systems sometimes treat messages with multiple bcc's as spam. But I also notice that for the past few weeks neither my Yahoo! or her Yahoo! email account has had anything in the spam folder. This makes me think that when Yahoo! sees a questionable message, it bounces it rather than send it to spam. That in turn makes me wonder whether there is something in the settings that is causing this. I would appreciate any thoughts about how to solve this problem. Thanks in advance!

P.S. I went to the settings in my wife's e-mail. She does not have any blocked addresses.

P.P.S.She uses the free version of Yahoo! email.

P.P.P.S. My wife has a lot of e-mails in her box, but this doesn't seem to stop any other incoming e-mail.

Email does get “black holed”, and large email platforms are tightening security so a certain % doesn’t get through.

If the sender is a mass emailer or has not kept current with changes to security protocols, the issue may need to be addressed on their side.

Even large orgs struggle to navigate the disconnect between marketing / sales / development & ops/IT.

What I’m seeing an increasing amount of are orgs where someone on the “revenue team” is trying to meet new targets and has a team of people to do outreach and has enabled them to use tools connected to the primary domain and leveraging AI…but they are not mindful of email communication protocols and this raises the profile of them looking like a spammer.

Keep in mind, they may in fact be a spammer.

I’ve seen cases where an entire orgs email gets shut down by Google because one group is not following established protocols consistently.

There are a few things:

1.) make sure they have the correct email. Triple check

2.) check how you updated the email address. There should be a “preference center” where you can opt-in to some emails or lists, but not others.

It’s not common for there to be multiple systems (marketing, sales & ops).

If it’s not specifically customized content or tied into your “account/history” you might be connected to a legacy system that’s not well maintained, if at all.

3.) call the sender - esp if you are a paying customer and this is a small org, they will help you with

4.) check to see if their domain is on a blacklist https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx. If so, reach out to someone at the org with this information

5.) re-opt in using your wife’s email and recreate the lists you are subscribed to. This will do a few things: it will be unambiguous to both the org and yahoo that she wants to receive email from the org and go through the privacy systems as they have been setup.

6.) Change email, even if only temporarily. This sucks but is sort of the same thing that plagued AOL years ago. They had filtering rules & infrastructure aged over time so delivery from a domain that did a lot of emailing could be applied very inconsistently depending on the server. It was sometimes impossible to resolve because they had no support or escalation path to anyone who could do anything for an individual user. Some domains simply don’t “like” each other and there’s only so much you can do. It’s almost certainly an issue with the sending parties email “hygiene”.

Sorry for long message.

It would be easier if you shared name of org to do a more thorough check on whether they are setup correctly and if this is symptom of a larger problem or if others are facing same challenges. There are more tools to do a “broader” review but too wonky to get into here. Feel free to DM & best of luck in any case.

 

[Crazed_RU]

Some very good detailed replies here. Generally this doesn’t have anything to do with individual settings on a user account. So things like adding the sender to your address book doesn’t help. Think of it like the us postal system. If you tell your local mail carrier I would like you to put my mail in my mail box upside down (stupid analogy but stay with me), that’s great and all, but if the sender of a piece of mail doesn’t put a stamp on it, or makes the mail package too big, or some other rule is not followed, that piece of mail never even enters the system so it is irrelevant what you’ve told your local mail carrier.

 

[retired711]

Email does get “black holed”, and large email platforms are tightening security so a certain % doesn’t get through.

If the sender is a mass emailer or has not kept current with changes to security protocols, the issue may need to be addressed on their side.

Even large orgs struggle to navigate the disconnect between marketing / sales / development & ops/IT.

What I’m seeing an increasing amount of are orgs where someone on the “revenue team” is trying to meet new targets and has a team of people to do outreach and has enabled them to use tools connected to the primary domain and leveraging AI…but they are not mindful of email communication protocols and this raises the profile of them looking like a spammer.

Keep in mind, they may in fact be a spammer.

I’ve seen cases where an entire orgs email gets shut down by Google because one group is not following established protocols consistently.

There are a few things:

1.) make sure they have the correct email. Triple check

2.) check how you updated the email address. There should be a “preference center” where you can opt-in to some emails or lists, but not others.

It’s not common for there to be multiple systems (marketing, sales & ops).

If it’s not specifically customized content or tied into your “account/history” you might be connected to a legacy system that’s not well maintained, if at all.

3.) call the sender - esp if you are a paying customer and this is a small org, they will help you with

4.) check to see if their domain is on a blacklist https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx. If so, reach out to someone at the org with this information

5.) re-opt in using your wife’s email and recreate the lists you are subscribed to. This will do a few things: it will be unambiguous to both the org and yahoo that she wants to receive email from the org and go through the privacy systems as they have been setup.

6.) Change email, even if only temporarily. This sucks but is sort of the same thing that plagued AOL years ago. They had filtering rules & infrastructure aged over time so delivery from a domain that did a lot of emailing could be applied very inconsistently depending on the server. It was sometimes impossible to resolve because they had no support or escalation path to anyone who could do anything for an individual user. Some domains simply don’t “like” each other and there’s only so much you can do. It’s almost certainly an issue with the sending parties email “hygiene”.

Sorry for long message.

It would be easier if you shared name of org to do a more thorough check on whether they are setup correctly and if this is symptom of a larger problem or if others are facing same challenges. There are more tools to do a “broader” review but too wonky to get into here. Feel free to DM & best of luck in any case.

Thanks! The blacklist link asks for the sender's IP. The sender also sends messages to my Outlook email. How can I find its IP?

 

[retired711]

Email does get “black holed”, and large email platforms are tightening security so a certain % doesn’t get through.

If the sender is a mass emailer or has not kept current with changes to security protocols, the issue may need to be addressed on their side.

Even large orgs struggle to navigate the disconnect between marketing / sales / development & ops/IT.

What I’m seeing an increasing amount of are orgs where someone on the “revenue team” is trying to meet new targets and has a team of people to do outreach and has enabled them to use tools connected to the primary domain and leveraging AI…but they are not mindful of email communication protocols and this raises the profile of them looking like a spammer.

Keep in mind, they may in fact be a spammer.

I’ve seen cases where an entire orgs email gets shut down by Google because one group is not following established protocols consistently.

There are a few things:

1.) make sure they have the correct email. Triple check

2.) check how you updated the email address. There should be a “preference center” where you can opt-in to some emails or lists, but not others.

It’s not common for there to be multiple systems (marketing, sales & ops).

If it’s not specifically customized content or tied into your “account/history” you might be connected to a legacy system that’s not well maintained, if at all.

3.) call the sender - esp if you are a paying customer and this is a small org, they will help you with

4.) check to see if their domain is on a blacklist https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx. If so, reach out to someone at the org with this information

5.) re-opt in using your wife’s email and recreate the lists you are subscribed to. This will do a few things: it will be unambiguous to both the org and yahoo that she wants to receive email from the org and go through the privacy systems as they have been setup.

6.) Change email, even if only temporarily. This sucks but is sort of the same thing that plagued AOL years ago. They had filtering rules & infrastructure aged over time so delivery from a domain that did a lot of emailing could be applied very inconsistently depending on the server. It was sometimes impossible to resolve because they had no support or escalation path to anyone who could do anything for an individual user. Some domains simply don’t “like” each other and there’s only so much you can do. It’s almost certainly an issue with the sending parties email “hygiene”.

Sorry for long message.

It would be easier if you shared name of org to do a more thorough check on whether they are setup correctly and if this is symptom of a larger problem or if others are facing same challenges. There are more tools to do a “broader” review but too wonky to get into here. Feel free to DM & best of luck in any case.

Let me reply further. The messages are coming from a local chapter of a national organization. (It's not the Sierra Club, but it's an organization structured the same way.) The sending address is a constant contact address. The chapter e-mails independently of the national organization, in part because the local and national organization's administrative systems can't communicate with each other. We'll see whether adding the sender's email to my wife's contacts helps. If it doesn't, I'll try more of your suggestions.

BTW, everything about the organization's administrative structure is terrible. When my wife joined, I put the dues on my credit card as a small gift to her. Guess what: the organization decided that I was the member, not my wife. And this is an organization that only women can join!!

 

[retired711]

Email does get “black holed”, and large email platforms are tightening security so a certain % doesn’t get through.

If the sender is a mass emailer or has not kept current with changes to security protocols, the issue may need to be addressed on their side.

Even large orgs struggle to navigate the disconnect between marketing / sales / development & ops/IT.

What I’m seeing an increasing amount of are orgs where someone on the “revenue team” is trying to meet new targets and has a team of people to do outreach and has enabled them to use tools connected to the primary domain and leveraging AI…but they are not mindful of email communication protocols and this raises the profile of them looking like a spammer.

Keep in mind, they may in fact be a spammer.

I’ve seen cases where an entire orgs email gets shut down by Google because one group is not following established protocols consistently.

There are a few things:

1.) make sure they have the correct email. Triple check

2.) check how you updated the email address. There should be a “preference center” where you can opt-in to some emails or lists, but not others.

It’s not common for there to be multiple systems (marketing, sales & ops).

If it’s not specifically customized content or tied into your “account/history” you might be connected to a legacy system that’s not well maintained, if at all.

3.) call the sender - esp if you are a paying customer and this is a small org, they will help you with

4.) check to see if their domain is on a blacklist https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx. If so, reach out to someone at the org with this information

5.) re-opt in using your wife’s email and recreate the lists you are subscribed to. This will do a few things: it will be unambiguous to both the org and yahoo that she wants to receive email from the org and go through the privacy systems as they have been setup.

6.) Change email, even if only temporarily. This sucks but is sort of the same thing that plagued AOL years ago. They had filtering rules & infrastructure aged over time so delivery from a domain that did a lot of emailing could be applied very inconsistently depending on the server. It was sometimes impossible to resolve because they had no support or escalation path to anyone who could do anything for an individual user. Some domains simply don’t “like” each other and there’s only so much you can do. It’s almost certainly an issue with the sending parties email “hygiene”.

Sorry for long message.

It would be easier if you shared name of org to do a more thorough check on whether they are setup correctly and if this is symptom of a larger problem or if others are facing same challenges. There are more tools to do a “broader” review but too wonky to get into here. Feel free to DM & best of luck in any case.

Still another question: having my wife change her e-mail address is a good idea for other reasons. Is there a way to open a new Yahoo! e-mail for her and to have future e-mail to her old address forwarded there? Thanks!!

 

[GoodOl'Rutgers]

Email does get “black holed”, and large email platforms are tightening security so a certain % doesn’t get through.

If the sender is a mass emailer or has not kept current with changes to security protocols, the issue may need to be addressed on their side.

Even large orgs struggle to navigate the disconnect between marketing / sales / development & ops/IT.

What I’m seeing an increasing amount of are orgs where someone on the “revenue team” is trying to meet new targets and has a team of people to do outreach and has enabled them to use tools connected to the primary domain and leveraging AI…but they are not mindful of email communication protocols and this raises the profile of them looking like a spammer.

Keep in mind, they may in fact be a spammer.

I’ve seen cases where an entire orgs email gets shut down by Google because one group is not following established protocols consistently.

There are a few things:

1.) make sure they have the correct email. Triple check

2.) check how you updated the email address. There should be a “preference center” where you can opt-in to some emails or lists, but not others.

It’s not common for there to be multiple systems (marketing, sales & ops).

If it’s not specifically customized content or tied into your “account/history” you might be connected to a legacy system that’s not well maintained, if at all.

3.) call the sender - esp if you are a paying customer and this is a small org, they will help you with

4.) check to see if their domain is on a blacklist https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx. If so, reach out to someone at the org with this information

5.) re-opt in using your wife’s email and recreate the lists you are subscribed to. This will do a few things: it will be unambiguous to both the org and yahoo that she wants to receive email from the org and go through the privacy systems as they have been setup.

6.) Change email, even if only temporarily. This sucks but is sort of the same thing that plagued AOL years ago. They had filtering rules & infrastructure aged over time so delivery from a domain that did a lot of emailing could be applied very inconsistently depending on the server. It was sometimes impossible to resolve because they had no support or escalation path to anyone who could do anything for an individual user. Some domains simply don’t “like” each other and there’s only so much you can do. It’s almost certainly an issue with the sending parties email “hygiene”.

Sorry for long message.

It would be easier if you shared name of org to do a more thorough check on whether they are setup correctly and if this is symptom of a larger problem or if others are facing same challenges. There are more tools to do a “broader” review but too wonky to get into here. Feel free to DM & best of luck in any case.

You did a great job explaining it. Sometimes length is needed.

I recall a friends small biz had this issue because he wanted to continue to use his AOL account despite having a website that had its own email addresses. So he had the website generate emails to him at his website email and that got auto-forwarded over to his AOL mail. And when he replied to the client email address copying the form-generated email from the website, some systems ID'd it as spam or a phishing attack. Then his biz gets on that kind of list and suddenly his responses to clients disappeared into a black hole.. or should that be BLOCK hole?

 

[GoodOl'Rutgers]

Still another question: having my wife change her e-mail address is a good idea for other reasons. Is there a way to open a new Yahoo! e-mail for her and to have future e-mail to her old address forwarded there? Thanks!!

why not get a Gmail account then?

 

[retired711]

why not get a Gmail account then?

We are familiar with Yahoo. I know that may not seem much of a reason, but I'm not sure we want to learn a new system.

 

[Big East Beast]

We are familiar with Yahoo. I know that may not seem much of a reason, but I'm not sure we want to learn a new system.

That is one solution and I understand the rationale, but doesn’t provide “diversity” of options. Sort of like only having Mastercards. Every now and again it’s good to have a Visa just because if shit hit the fan you can say, try this one.

 

[GoodOl'Rutgers]

We are familiar with Yahoo. I know that may not seem much of a reason, but I'm not sure we want to learn a new system.

Well, all the web-based emails are similar. And if you use a different one, like Gmail, you might find separate email systems might fit you better. You are looking for a new email to separate email purposes if I read above correctly.

 

[retired711]

Well, all the web-based emails are similar. And if you use a different one, like Gmail, you might find separate email systems might fit you better. You are looking for a new email to separate email purposes if I read above correctly.

I guess I didn't explain myself well. My wife has a lot of unread messages in her yahoo inbox. My thought is to have her start a new e-mail address, forward future e-mail to it, sort the e-mail in the old address by sender, and send over the stuff that's worth keeping (probably not much). But maybe that's more trouble than it's worth.

 

[GoodOl'Rutgers]

I guess I didn't explain myself well. My wife has a lot of unread messages in her yahoo inbox. My thought is to have her start a new e-mail address, forward future e-mail to it, sort the e-mail in the old address by sender, and send over the stuff that's worth keeping (probably not much). But maybe that's more trouble than it's worth.

Ahhh... yeah.. I get it. Did the guy above mention using filters? Most systems have a way to list domains you want or do not want email from. And, of course, you probably have a "spam button" identifying an email as spam.

But if the problem is that the valid email address has made it to various spam lists, you'll always be getting unsolicited mail from new domains.

Modern problems eh? Put your email in a contest here or there.. and its over!

Yahoo help on the topic

 

[RU848789]

Email does get “black holed”, and large email platforms are tightening security so a certain % doesn’t get through.

If the sender is a mass emailer or has not kept current with changes to security protocols, the issue may need to be addressed on their side.

Even large orgs struggle to navigate the disconnect between marketing / sales / development & ops/IT.

What I’m seeing an increasing amount of are orgs where someone on the “revenue team” is trying to meet new targets and has a team of people to do outreach and has enabled them to use tools connected to the primary domain and leveraging AI…but they are not mindful of email communication protocols and this raises the profile of them looking like a spammer.

Keep in mind, they may in fact be a spammer.

I’ve seen cases where an entire orgs email gets shut down by Google because one group is not following established protocols consistently.

There are a few things:

1.) make sure they have the correct email. Triple check

2.) check how you updated the email address. There should be a “preference center” where you can opt-in to some emails or lists, but not others.

It’s not common for there to be multiple systems (marketing, sales & ops).

If it’s not specifically customized content or tied into your “account/history” you might be connected to a legacy system that’s not well maintained, if at all.

3.) call the sender - esp if you are a paying customer and this is a small org, they will help you with

4.) check to see if their domain is on a blacklist https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx. If so, reach out to someone at the org with this information

5.) re-opt in using your wife’s email and recreate the lists you are subscribed to. This will do a few things: it will be unambiguous to both the org and yahoo that she wants to receive email from the org and go through the privacy systems as they have been setup.

6.) Change email, even if only temporarily. This sucks but is sort of the same thing that plagued AOL years ago. They had filtering rules & infrastructure aged over time so delivery from a domain that did a lot of emailing could be applied very inconsistently depending on the server. It was sometimes impossible to resolve because they had no support or escalation path to anyone who could do anything for an individual user. Some domains simply don’t “like” each other and there’s only so much you can do. It’s almost certainly an issue with the sending parties email “hygiene”.

Sorry for long message.

It would be easier if you shared name of org to do a more thorough check on whether they are setup correctly and if this is symptom of a larger problem or if others are facing same challenges. There are more tools to do a “broader” review but too wonky to get into here. Feel free to DM & best of luck in any case.

I had kind of the opposite problem when I retired from Merck in early 2020. I had about 150 people on a "friends and family" weather email list and had about 300 people at work who got weather emails from me (both very similar content I post here) and there was never an issue from my Merck email address.

Then, about a month before I formally retired, I figured I'd test sending the notes from my gmail account, which I had rarely used before 2020, and all hell broke loose for me, as the emails kept getting bounced back to me as undeliverable. I tried all kinds of solutions I read on user forums and such, but to no avail and eventually I read that having email lists greater than 100 recipients led gmail to "flag" them (as if I were a spammer), so I broke the friends/family list into 2 lists and the work list into 3 lists and that actually worked, so now I send 5 emails for every update instead of 2.

Only takes a minute or two of extra work, but it's still annoying. I stopped looking for better solutions though - one that sounded good at the time was to use a program like MailChimp, but I spent 20+ years using Outlook (on top of gmail) and there was no way I wanted to lose that. I've also tried to wean people from email, but most seem to like the emails over another option I gave them of reading the same content (and more) on Facebook.

 

[iReC89]

I’ll put my money on the address getting entered incorrectly into constant contact.

Google does a number of things well for free and Gmail is one of them. They have features for fetching mail from old email accounts. Using Yahoo for email is a bit like having an aol account still. You also get access to a lot of Google services with one account that don’t exist with Yahoo. Better security features also. Verizon owns yahoo. - need I say more?

 

[Big East Beast]

I had kind of the opposite problem when I retired from Merck in early 2020. I had about 150 people on a "friends and family" weather email list and had about 300 people at work who got weather emails from me (both very similar content I post here) and there was never an issue from my Merck email address.

Then, about a month before I formally retired, I figured I'd test sending the notes from my gmail account, which I had rarely used before 2020, and all hell broke loose for me, as the emails kept getting bounced back to me as undeliverable. I tried all kinds of solutions I read on user forums and such, but to no avail and eventually I read that having email lists greater than 100 recipients led gmail to "flag" them (as if I were a spammer), so I broke the friends/family list into 2 lists and the work list into 3 lists and that actually worked, so now I send 5 emails for every update instead of 2.

Only takes a minute or two of extra work, but it's still annoying. I stopped looking for better solutions though - one that sounded good at the time was to use a program like MailChimp, but I spent 20+ years using Outlook (on top of gmail) and there was no way I wanted to lose that. I've also tried to wean people from email, but most seem to like the emails over another option I gave them of reading the same content (and more) on Facebook.

Mail chimp is a different animal. I remember what you had, which was more like a newsletter or blog. Mail chimp would handle unsubscribes etc but most of these types of projects make their way to blogging platform like Medium or Substack.

Sending regular email to large groups used to be a decent option but now it’s just a very bad idea. Privacy & data handling regs are not insignificant, so it’s not worth it having no automated system to manage opt-ins/subscribers.

Thanks! The blacklist link asks for the sender's IP. The sender also sends messages to my Outlook email. How can I find its IP?

The IP would be listed in the email header. There’s a button somewhere in outlook to “view headers”.

But if the emails are coming from Constant Constant, that’s an ESP (email service provider) and they have pretty good deliverability systems in place. Email from them will be routing through clusters of servers, so checking just one IP isn’t really a good test of anything.

I’d definitely make sure they have the correct address before you go too far down technical rabbit holes here.