It’s that time of the year again: the sun is out, birds are chirping, flowers are starting to bloom…and Yahoo is disabling unused accounts (technically it’s Verizon Media Group, but the bounce message is vintage Yahoo). At least, we think they’re disabling unused accounts…

What we know: Senders in multiple industry forums and channels have reported increased bounced rates from VMG over the past couple of weeks, with many of the bounces indicating “[t]his mailbox is disabled.” There’s been some debate over how permanent these disablements may be, but the prevailing wisdom is that a bounce of this nature is likely to be permanently bad and should be removed from your mailing rotation.

Gmail Postmaster Tools data issues

Along with the VMG bounces, many senders have been commiserating about the lack of Google Postmaster data for the past few days. Like most who have reported this problem, the most recent data in my own account is from March 23rd (in my case, data also appears spotty for about a week leading up to 3/23). The unofficial word is that Google’s technical team is aware of the issue and working to resolve it soon.

-BG