Ask the Expert: Clea Moore, Principal Product Manager, Yahoo Mail

Ask the Expert: Clea Moore, Principal Product Manager, Yahoo Mail

Countless myths abound in the world of email deliverability. That’s why there’s no one better to clear up these common misconceptions than the leading experts in the world of email. Every month, we’ll bring you a Q&A with leaders from inbox providers, spam trap networks, antispam systems, and more in our new Expert Series blog. 

In our eleventh Expert Series blog, we chat with Clea Moore. Clea is a Principal Product Manager at Yahoo Mail, where she leads a team focused on helping users identify and engage with brands they can trust. Prior to Yahoo, with over a decade of experience on the sending side of email, Clea has helped global brands optimize deliverability, enhance engagement, and navigate evolving industry standards. She strives to demystify the inbox for brands and develop products that make email better. 

Now, let’s dive in.

Q&A

Q: As a Principal Product Manager at Yahoo, what does your role entail?

A key focus for my role is building tools and features that improve transparency and positive outcomes for the email ecosystem, whether that be for senders, users, or our platform as a mailbox provider. That work involves striking the right balance to ensure we’re delivering helpful signals to senders, while continuing to protect our users – our main goal. 

Q: Before joining Yahoo, you had a background on the sender side. What is something you learned after joining Yahoo that you wish you knew as a sender?

One of the biggest shifts is understanding how heavily mailbox providers rely on user-driven signals. As a sender, it’s easy to focus on things like content or subject lines — but on the receiver side, user engagement signals, whether positive (e.g. opens/clicks, reads) or negative, (e.g. spam complaints, delete-without-reading) carry significantly more weight. I also gained a deeper appreciation for how holistic reputation is—it's not just about one campaign, but long-term patterns across IPs, domains, authentication, and user behavior.

Q: What percentage of mail received by Yahoo would be considered spam?

While exact figures fluctuate over time, the majority of global email traffic is unsolicited or abusive in nature. At Yahoo, we operate large-scale filtering systems designed to ensure that users primarily see the messages they want, while filtering unwanted or harmful content.

Q: Yahoo states ‘Sending email to users who are not reading them will harm your delivery metrics and reputation.’ With Apple Mail Privacy Protection resulting in inflated open rates, how do you recommend senders navigate?

Opens have become a less reliable signal across the industry. We recommend shifting focus toward more meaningful engagement indicators—such as clicks, conversions, and, importantly, the absence of negative signals like spam complaints. At Yahoo, we continue to emphasize sending relevant content to actively engaged users and removing inactive recipients over time. 

Q: What information is available to senders in the new Yahoo ‘Insights’ tool?

Insights provides aggregated delivery performance data for verified DKIM domains, giving senders a clearer picture of how their mail is performing across Yahoo-managed properties. Today, it includes key metrics like spam complaint rate and total delivered messages, along with trend comparisons over time to help identify changes in performance.

Q: Will this reporting include metrics from all Yahoo managed domains? If so, what domains are included in that list?

Yes—Insights aggregates data across all Yahoo-managed domains. This includes Yahoo Mail, and other domains operated within the Yahoo Mail ecosystem (the list is very long, and it fluctuates).

Q: Is there a minimum volume needed for campaign data to populate?

Yes. Insights requires a minimum daily volume threshold before data is displayed. This ensures the metrics are statistically meaningful and protects user privacy. Additionally, data will only appear for verified DKIM domains and typically begins populating within 24–48 hours after activation.

Q: How is the spam complaint rate calculated in ‘Insights’? Why might that rate be different to the complaint rate I see in my reporting with my ESP?

The spam complaint rate in Insights is calculated based only on messages delivered to the inbox. This reflects the “true” complaint rate from a user experience perspective. If a sender’s internal reporting includes messages that were filtered to spam or not delivered to the inbox, their calculated rate may appear lower than what’s shown in Insights.

Q: What is the difference between the 0.1% 'recommended maximum’ and 0.3% ‘enforcement threshold’ spam complaint limits in the dashboard?

The 0.1% level is a best-practice guideline—senders should aim to stay below this to maintain strong performance and maximize inbox placement. The 0.3% level represents an enforcement threshold. Exceeding this threshold may result in deliverability impacts, such as messages being filtered to spam or blocked.

Q: What advice would you give to a sender that notices some of their campaigns are being delivered to the spam folder?

Start by looking at your audience and engagement. High complaint rates or sending to unengaged users are common drivers of spam placement. From there, review your authentication setup (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), sending patterns, and content quality. It’s also important to ensure you’re honoring unsubscribe requests quickly and maintaining clean lists. Deliverability is rarely impacted by a single factor—it’s usually a combination of signals that reflect overall sender behavior.

Q: In the past when people have asked what Yahoo pays attention to when determining reputation, the answer hasn’t been engagement, but “negative signals”. Can you clarify what individual elements are included in that description?

Negative signals primarily refer to user actions that indicate a message is unwanted—most notably spam complaints. Beyond that, Yahoo evaluates a range of factors including domain and IP reputation, authentication results, URL reputation, and broader sending patterns. While positive engagement can be helpful, negative signals tend to carry more weight because they directly reflect user dissatisfaction. 

Thanks to Clea! And be sure to stay tuned each month, as we’ll chat with another expert in the world of email marketing to provide you with further insight into the ins and outs of email deliverability.

Until next time, check out Twilio SendGrid’s Email Deliverability Services packages to get started, or contact our Sales team to learn more about improving your email deliverability.