Deliverability Update (and maybe a Game Changer): Yahoo!, Gmail and others create new commercial email folders

Yahoo!, Gmail and other email providers have started moving commercial email into separate non-Inbox folders, even organizing it by categories such as ‘shopping’, ‘travel’ and ‘finance’. 

This means that by default, email will no longer be delivered to the Inbox at those domains.  Some good news is that it appears when this occurs, it will also no longer go to the ‘spam’ folder either.  There also does not appear to be a whitelist workaround except for address book entries, not even for SenderScoreCertified or Goodmail Certified Email senders.

Does this mean the end of all of our deliverability problems?  Will it dramatically decrease domain performance to those email providers?    I can’t say now, but we’ve begun tracking it more closely and you should as well.  

What do you think about this technology?

Here's the screen shot from my Yahoo! account showing the new ‘Shopping’ folder:

This is an application developed by OtherInbox that users have to download to ‘sort’ their email.  It’s available only for Yahoo! And Gmail right now, but the other webmail and software providers will get added soon.  It doesn’t seem to catch ‘all’ commercial email yet, but the vast majority is identified and moved and I have verified clients who were in the Spam folder also got moved to the right commercial folder.

More details on this application can be found here.

Yahoo! describes and promotes it here.

It's important to remember that since it’s an application, it requires users to agree to separate terms.  As a result, it won’t reach critical mass anytime soon.