AOL/Yahoo Consolidation Will Impact Email Senders

If you recall way back in 2015, Verizon acquired AOL and then Yahoo in 2017. Following these acquisitions, Yahoo and AOL were merged under Oath Inc., a subsidiary of Verizon Communications.

Little information has been made publicly available regarding the consolidation of AOL and Yahoo’s email infrastructure, but we do know AOL’s MX (mail exchange) servers will be migrated over to Yahoo’s infrastructure as soon as next month.

As many senders experienced issues (and still are experiencing issues) with Microsoft’s consolidation of Office 365 and Hotmail platforms, we may see something similar with Yahoo/AOL.

As far as we know, all their domains (aol.com, yahoo.com, verizon.net, etc.) will remain active. I would expect that their abuse/postmaster teams to be consolidated, as well as reputation and feedback loop (FBL) data. What will be interesting to see is how they change their FBL process — AOL uses the traditional IP-based FBL, while Yahoo’s is domain-based.

Senders should keep a close eye on their deliverability performance with AOL/Yahoo domains as this migration begins, and report any issues as appropriate. It will likely be a “learn as we go” approach for both senders and Oath. The MessageGears team will be monitoring this very closely — advising our clients of any new developments and making back-end changes as necessary. Hopefully, Oath will provide more detailed information to the public soon.