Email expert Laura Atkins put the word out that Yahoo is retiring old accounts, shutting down a few little-used products, and generally cleaning house. Spring cleaning is probably good news for Yahoo, but it could mean higher bounces for you.

Just to ease your mind, we haven’t seen a huge uptick in bounces. We’re remaining steady with a 99.5% delivery rate, but the results will vary by user. Our sending volume to Yahoo is significant enough that a few users could easily get lost in that statistic.

Rather than sounding the alarm, I thought I’d explain why this move by Yahoo shouldn’t surprise you.

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As the first service to offer iPhone and Yahoo! Mobile access for email marketing, we would be remiss in not keeping up with the current trends in mobile technology.  MailChimp is happy to announce that we have extended mobile access to all Google Android devices.  From your T-Mobile G1 (or future Android enabled device), just navigate over to http://m.mailchimp.com and you will be redirected to the account login page.  You can access your campaigns, check stats and even subscribe people on the fly.

You’re welcome.

Here’s an interesting article about email authentication over at NetworkWorld: Will Yahoo block messages that aren’t signed?

For years, ISPs have been a little vague about how they’re going to handle authentication. Will it be used to block email? Does every legit email marketer need to authenticate their messages? Do ESPs need to offer it to all our clients?

Network World Senior Editor Carolyn Duffy Marsan interviewed Mark Risher, anti-abuse product manager for Yahoo Mail, and asked some blunt questions, like:

1. What benefits does DKIM provide?
2. A year from now, will you be stopping a lot of mail at the front gate because of DKIM?
3. Will you send non-authenticated email through more filtering?

Risher also shared the following:“We have seen aggressive uptake of DomainKeys. More than 40% of our inbound traffic to Yahoo Mail is using DomainKeys. That’s more than 1 billion messages a day with the open source version. DKIM is its successor. …Within 18 months, all of the top financial institutions will use DKIM.”

FYI, MailChimp offers both DKIM and Domain Keys (along with SPF and SenderID) for free. Just check a box, and bam—you’re authenticated.