Yahoo has announced that they are closing down its Chinese email service.1 Any mail sent after August 19, 2013, may not be received by its intended recipient unless they have signed up with Alibaba’s AliCloud service (in which case, mail will be received until the end of 2014).
This brings up a question that is similar (but not quite the same) to one we dealt with previously, when you had a domain in transition during a partnership winding down: How do you deal with the shutdown of an entire domain?
In this case, you know that the domain is closing. You also know the date upon which the closure is happening. What you do not know is if a recipient will be moving to the AliCloud service (which will allow an additional 16 months of service).
In these cases, it is best to assume that all addresses will be expiring on the closure date (August 19, in this case). Just as you would have done in the case of a domain transition, you address this by sending an email drip campaign to prompt recipients to update their information. In this case, you would create a list or a group of people whose email addresses end in “yahoo.cn” and then send them an email saying that you’d like to continue communicating with them, but due to the shutdown of their provider, you need for them to update their contact email address to their new address.
Then, when the transition day finally arrives, you suppress sending mail to the old domain. This isn’t really a problem, since most of those subscribers will never get your email now anyway. They can be safely suppressed, with you being secure in the knowledge that there was nothing that you could do to save them.
- Ian Steadman, Yahoo China to Close Email Service, WIRED (U.K.) (Apr. 22, 2013), http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/22/yahoo-china-email, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20130425011204/http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/22/yahoo-china-email. ↩︎
About the Author
Mickey Chandler is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
