Return On Email Subscriber

Yahoo! is introducing new email address domains - ymail.com & rocketmail.com. Good for users, bad for email marketers.

I have always hated my Yahoo! email address, so I jumped at the chance to get something better. Score! I got the same extension as my Gmail address (us email marketers have a lot of email accounts, and we actually check them all).

Why is that bad for email marketing? Because Yahoo! didn’t ask me to change my @yahoo.com to the new address. And in my @yahoo.com account, there is no tool that I have found that allows me to change my account to my new address. There are numerous implications for both ESP’s and Email Marketers.

As a user, do I have to go into my (now) old account and change all of my subscriptions to my new address? I now have 2 Yahoo! ID’s with no ability to merge. Manually? Fuggeddaboutit. Apparently Yahoo.com Id’s are technically based on Email addresses.

We are looking at potentially millions of email addresses that will go dormant. Will they become honeypots? Will you be penalized by Yahoo for emailing these addresses once they stop checking?

Also, if the adoption rate is as high as I think it will be (hate your jsteve87321@yahoo address?), and Yahoo! doesn’t adopt an account transfer tool, we are looking at millions of wasted dollars from Companies emailing people who “moved without a forwarding address”.

Maybe Yahoo! is worse off than we thought. This seems like a no-brainer. Apparently it’s a Yahoo no brainer. Let’s hope they figure it out, or sell to Google.