Disappearing domains

laura
Industry
June 3, 2017

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.

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.

Six best practices for every mailer

People get into all sorts of details when talking about best practices. But so much of email depends on the type of email and the target market and the goals of the sender. It’s difficult to come up with universal best practices.
I’ve said in the past that I think that best practices are primarily technical. I don’t believe there is a best frequency or a best time to send mail or a best image to text ratio.
My top 6 best practices every marketer should be doing (and too few are).

Harvesting and forging email addresses

For the contact address on our website, Steve has set up a rotating set of addresses. This is to minimize the amount of spam we have to deal with coming from address harvesters. This has worked quite well. In fact it works so well I didn’t expect that publishing an email address for taking reader questions would generate a lot of spam.
Boy, was I wrong. That address has been on the website less than a month and I’m already getting lots of spam to it. Most of it is business related spam, but there’s a couple things that make me think that someone has been signing that address up to mailing lists.
One is the confirmation email I received from Yelp. I don’t actually believe Yelp harvested my address and tried to create me an email account. I was happy when I got the first mail from Yelp. It said “click here to confirm your account.” Yay! Yelp is actually using confirmations so I just have to ignore the mail and that will all go away.
At least I was happy about it, until I started getting Yelp newsletters to that address.
Yelp gets half a star for attempting to do COI, but loses half for sending newsletters to people who didn’t confirm their account.
I really didn’t believe that people would grab a clearly tagged address off the blog and subscribe it to mailing lists or networking sites. I simply didn’t believe this happened anymore. I know forge subscribing used to be common, but it does appear that someone forge signed me up for a Yelp account. Clearly there are more dumb idiots out there than I thought.
Of course, it’s not just malicious people signing the address up to lists. There are also spammers harvesting directly off the website.
I did expect that there would be some harvesting going on and that I would get spam to the address. I am very surprised at the volume and type of spam, though. I’m getting a lot of chinese language spam, a lot of “join our business organization” spam and mail claiming I subscribed to receive their offers.
Surprisingly, much of the spam to this address violates CAN SPAM in some way shape or form. And I can prove harvesting, which would net treble damages if I had the time or inclination to sue.
It’s been an interesting experience, putting an unfiltered address on the website. Unfortunately, I am at risk of losing your questions because of the amount of spam coming in. I don’t think I’ve missed any, yet, but losing real mail is always a risk when an address gets a lot of spam – whether or not the recipient runs filters.
I’m still pondering solutions, but for now the questions address will remain as it is.