Disappearing domains

On May 31, British broadband provider EE discontinued service for a number of email domains: Orange.net, Orangehome.co.uk, Wanadoo.co.uk, Freeserve.co.uk, Fsbusiness.co.uk, Fslife.co.uk, Fsmail.net, Fsworld.co.uk, and Fsnet.co.uk.
These domains were acquired by EE as part of multiple mergers and acquisitions. On their help page, EE explains that the proliferation of free email services with advanced functionality has led to a decrease in email usage at these domains.
Yesterday, Terra.co.br announced they were discontinuing email to a number of their free domains as of June 30, 2017: terra.com, terra.com.ar, mi.terra.cl, terra.com.co, terra.com.mx, terra.com.pe, terra.com.ve, and terra.com.ec.

I’m not surprised to see these domains going away and I think we’ll see more of it going forward. The reasons are pretty simple. Mail is not an easy service to run. Mail doesn’t bring in a lot of money. Dedicated mailbox providers do a great job and the addresses from them are portable.

Mail is not an easy service

Managing a mail server is not an easy task. There’s so much to pay attention to and monitor to keep the network and users safe. Spammers are always changing tactics and modifying their methods. They work tirelessly to find ways to get their mail in front of people. Filters cannot be set and forgotten. Someone must manage and tweak them constantly. Sure, you can outsource it to commercial filters, but that’s still a cost.
It’s not just spam filtering that requires expertise, it’s also virus and malware filtering. Think about the botnets and worms affecting users recently. They’re often infecting machines by way of email. But they use broadband networks to spread. Broadband providers, at least the responsible ones, have dedicated security teams to monitor infections, cut off infected users, and assist them in cleaning up and getting back online.
All of these functions take money, which leads me to the second point.

No one wants to pay for mail

OK, maybe not NO one. But, in general, consumers won’t pay extra for email service. It’s a core feature, not an add-on. This means that broadband providers have to pay for spam and virus filtering out of general revenues. They can’t add features and then bump rates. Consumers expect all the bells and whistles with their email accounts, and if it’s not there, well, they’ll go to Gmail.
Which leads me to my third point.

Free mail providers are driving innovation

Mailbox providers, like Gmail and Microsoft are driving innovation in the inbox. Both companies have announced new products over the last few years like Sweep, Tabs, and Focused inbox. They’re also driving standards and innovation in the backend email space. Gmail has already started using ARC, they support TLS, and they have one of the most advance spam filtering systems in the world.
All of these factors are contributing to the decrease in mail usage at broadband providers. Even better, a free mail address isn’t tied to your location. If you move out of your broadband provider’s area, you can lose your email address. Freemail addresses are portable and stick with you forever. I’ve had one Hotmail address for over 20 years now, and the same username at Gmail since someone sent me one of the coveted invites to the Gmail beta test.
Ironically, over the years there’s been a push by marketers to find a users real email address. The theory was that the free mail addresses weren’t the addresses recipients really used, and so weren’t as valuable as the real address. But that’s not what happens. Many people use freemail addresses as their primary addresses.

Advice for marketers

As domains continue to disappear, marketers are going to have to up their game when it comes to bounce handling and data hygiene. Unless marketers allow users to update their email addresses, they risk forever losing contact with those customers. That’s a loss. But there’s a bigger loss hiding in these domains. Filtering companies and public blocklists use abandoned domains as a data source.  Sure, they’ll bounce mail for 12 – 24 months, but down the road these addresses could drive spam blocking.
Data hygiene is a fact of life. Domains, and email addresses, going away are a fact of life. Planning ahead and incorporating ongoing maintenance into processes will lessen the events of domains going away. Companies that have preference centers or the ability to change addresses can react swiftly to events like this. A domain is going away? All they have to do is grab subscribers at those domains and send a few emails asking for the new address. Companies that don’t have processes in place to handle these events, are going to lose subscribers. They risk blocking in the long term.
Failing to implement data hygiene processes will lead to poor delivery. Don’t let it happen to you.

Appending in a nutshell
Women. Technology. Moving Forward.

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August 2015: The month in review

It’s been a busy blogging month and we’ve all written about challenges and best practices. I found myself advocating that any company that does email marketing really must have a well-defined delivery strategy. Email is such vital part of how most companies communicate with customers and potential customers, and the delivery landscape continues to increase in complexity (see my post on pattern matching for a more abstract look at how people tend to think about filters and getting to the inbox). Successful email marketers are proactive about delivery strategy and are able to respond quickly as issues arise. Stay tuned for more from us on this topic.
I also wrote up some deliverability advice for the DNC, which I think is valuable for anyone looking at how to maintain engagement with a list over time.  It’s also worth thinking about in the context of how to re-engage a list that may have been stagnant for a while. A comment on that post inspired a followup discussion about how delivery decisions get made, and whether an individual person in the process could impact something like an election through these delivery decisions. What do you think?
As we frequently point out, “best practices” in delivery evolve over time, and all too often, companies set up mail programs and never go back to check that things continue to run properly. We talked about how to check your tech, as well as what to monitor during and after a send. Josh wrote about utilizing all of your data across multiple mail streams, which is critical for understanding how you’re engaging with your recipients, as well as the importance of continuous testing to see what content and presentation strategies work best for those recipients.
Speaking of recipients, we wrote a bit about online identity and the implications of unverified email addresses in regards to the Ashley Madison hack and cautioned about false data and what might result from the release of that data.
Steve’s in-depth technical series for August was a two-part look at TXT records — what they are and how to use them — and he explains that the ways people use these, properly and improperly, can have a real impact on your sends.
In spam news, the self-proclaimed Spam King Sanford Wallace is still spamming, despite numerous judgments against him and his most recent guilty plea this month. For anyone else still confused about spam, the FTC answered some questions on the topic. It’s a good intro or refresher to share with colleagues. We also wrote about the impact of botnets on the inbox (TL;DR version: not much. The bulk of the problem for end users continues to be people making poor marketing decisions.) In other fraud news, we wrote about a significant spearphishing case and how DMARC may or may not help companies protect themselves.

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It's not about the spamtraps

I’ve talked about spamtraps in the past but they keep coming up in so many different discussions I have with people about delivery that I feel the need to write another blog post about them.
Spamtraps are …
… addresses that did not or could not sign up to receive mail from a sender.
… often mistakenly entered into signup forms (typos or people who don’t know their email addresses).
… often found on older lists.
… sometimes scraped off websites and sold by list brokers.
… sometimes caused by terrible bounce management.
… only a symptom …

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Would you buy a used car from that guy?

There are dozens of people and companies standing up and offering suggestions on best practices in email marketing. Unfortunately, many of those companies don’t actually practice what they preach in managing their own email accounts.
I got email today to an old work email address of mine from Strongmail. To be fair it was a technically correct email. Everything one would expect from a company handling large volumes of emails.  It’s clear that time and energy was put into the technical setup of the send. If only they had put even half that effort into deciding who to send the email to. Sadly, they didn’t.
My first thought, upon receiving the mail, was that some new, eager employee bought a very old and crufty list somewhere. Because Strongmail has a reputation for being responsible mailers, I sent them a copy of the email to abuse@. I figured they’d want to know that they had a new sales / marketing person who was doing some bad stuff.
I know how frustrating handling abuse@ can be, so I try to be short and sweet in my complaints. For this one, I simply said, “Someone at Strongmail has appended, harvested or otherwise acquired an old email address of mine. This has been added to your mailing list and I’m now receiving spam from you. ”
They respond with an email that starts with:
“Thank you for your thoughtful response to our opt-in request. On occasion, we provide members of our database with the opportunity to opt-in to receive email marketing communications from us.”
Wait. What? Members of our database? How did this address get into your database?
“I can’t be sure from our records but it looks like someone from StrongMail reached out to you several years ago.  It’s helpful that you let us know to unsubscribe you.  Thank you again.”
There you have it. According to the person answering email at abuse@ Strongmail they sent me a message because they had sent mail to me in the past. Is that really what you did? Send mail to very old email addresses because someone, at some point in the past, sent mail to that address? And you don’t know when, don’t know where the address came from, don’t know how it was acquired, but decided to reach out to me?
How many bad practices can you mix into a single send, Strongmail? Sending mail to addresses where you don’t know how you got them? Sending mail to addresses that you got at least 6 years ago? Sending mail to addresses that were never opted-in to any of your mail? And when people point out, gently and subtly, that maybe this is a bad idea, you just add them to your global suppression list?
Oh. Wait. I know what you’re going to tell me. All of your bad practices don’t count because this was an ‘opt-in’ request. People who didn’t want the mail didn’t have to do anything, therefore there is no reason not to spam them! They ignore it and they are dropped from your list. Except it doesn’t work that way. Double opt-in requests to someone has asked to be subscribed or is an active customer or prospect is one thing. Requests sent to addresses of unknown provenance are still spam.
Just for the record, I have a good idea of where they got my address. Many years ago Strongmail approached Word to the Wise to explore a potential partnership. We would work with and through Strongmail to provide delivery consulting and best practices advice for their customers. As part of this process we did exchange business cards with a number of Strongmail employees. I suspect those cards were left in a desk when the employees moved on. Whoever got that desk, or cleaned it out, found  those cards and added them to the ‘member database.’
But wait! It gets even better. Strongmail was sending me this mail, so that they could get permission to send me email about Email and Social Media Marketing Best Practices. I’m almost tempted to sign up to provide me unending blog fodder for my new series entitled “Don’t do this!”

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