Peek Behind the Curtain: How Email Marketers Should Use Yahoo’s New Sender Hub Insights and Google Postmaster Tools v2

If you’ve been paying attention lately, you might have noticed a significant influx of updates from mailbox providers—and they’re not done yet!  

Yahoo and Gmail have recently introduced two new features: Yahoo Sender Hub Insights and Google Postmaster Tools v2. These tools offer senders valuable insights into their email performance, helping them better understand how their messages are being received. 

To learn more about these email performance updates and how senders can use them to their advantage, we sat down with Validity’s Sr. Director of Professional Services and Customer Success Laura Christensen. She is passionate about helping marketers create better subscriber experiences, and during her 20 years in the industry, she’s helped countless senders optimize their email programs across industries and regions. 

Q.What is the Yahoo Sender Hub and what’s new? 

A: The Yahoo Sender Hub is a portal designed to help senders troubleshoot deliverability issues at Yahoo mailboxes. It also provides detailed information about sender performance specific to Yahoo’s bulk sender requirements, offering guidance for senders aiming to successfully reach their subscribers’ inboxes.  

To meet Yahoo’s guidelines, senders must keep spam complaints below 0.3 percent, implement strong authentication mechanisms such as DMARC, and ensure users have the option to unsubscribe with just one click. 

Recently, Yahoo launched Sender Hub Insights, a feature that provides data points to help senders better understand their performance.  

The two new metrics offered by Sender Hub Insights are: 

• Spam complaint rate: The percentage of email marked as spam after being delivered to the inbox.   

• Delivered volume: Using Yahoo’s calculations for spam complaint rates, senders can estimate their inbox placement rate at Yahoo. 

“Yahoo is calculating their spam complaint rate only based on the emails that reach the inbox,” Christensen explained. “This means the spam complaint rate provided by your ESP (email service provider) might not align with Yahoo’s data.” 

Christensen noted that Yahoo is offering senders a unique opportunity with its new feature. “The way they’re calculating the complaint rate shows you exactly how Yahoo views your emails in relation to their bulk sender requirements and what works best for their users,” she added. 

Q.What is Google Postmaster Tools and what’s new?  

A: Google recently made a similar update to its email performance tools. The first version of Google Postmaster Tools provided senders with valuable insights, including a dashboard featuring color-coded reputation data for sending IPs and domains, ranging from low to high reputation. 

With the release of Version 2 (v2) of Google Postmaster Tools, Google has introduced what many in the industry are calling the “compliance dashboard.” This new view includes a list of Gmail’s bulk sender requirements, showing senders whether their program is passing or failing these criteria. Notably absent from v2 is the color-coded reputational data from v1, which many senders have come to rely on to get a clear picture of how Gmail views them as a sender.  

“Many senders are concerned about the loss of the color-coded reputation dashboard,” noted Christensen. In fact, Google received so much feedback that they announced they were postponing the depreciation of the legacy Postmaster tools. “I believe Google will continue to provide v1 access for senders through the end of peak holiday season. Whether the sender feedback Google received was compelling enough for them to add the reputation dashboard into v2 is still TBD.”  

Reputation dashboard aside, Google is making other insights available in v2. The update is very similar to Yahoo’s approach—the focus has shifted toward very specific data points that Gmail uses to make decisions about deliverability, filtering, and inbox placement.  

What do these updates mean for senders?

A: The new dashboards mark a significant change for senders. While some familiar reputation reporting may be changing, the new data points provided by both Gmail and Yahoo are more specific and user-friendly. 

“When it comes to email performance, the more data, the better,” said Christensen. “These new updates act as a follow-up to the previous bulk sender requirement announcements, making it explicitly clear where you stand as a sender and where you can improve.” 

Sending emails to different mailbox providers comes with its own set of nuances, but these updates empower senders to troubleshoot issues with greater accuracy. By providing direct insights from the source, Gmail and Yahoo allow senders to proactively address vulnerabilities and optimize their programs for better deliverability. 

What’s next?  

Will Gmail and Yahoo continue to expand these insights? Only time will tell! But rest assured, your friends at Validity will keep you updated if they do. 

Curious to learn more about the nuances of sending to major mailbox providers? Check out our video series, packed with practical tips for sending to Microsoft, Apple, Gmail, and Yahoo.