dead addresses
As mentioned before, Google’s planning to disable and delete accounts that have been inactive for two years or longer; they promise not to start doing this until December; they have been warning every Google user of this change via email; and they promise to further notify impacted users before disabling specific accounts.Some folks are up in arms about this change in Google policy. According to CNBC, “Google’s plan to purge inactive accounts isn’t sitting well with some users.” But the truth is, Google has kind of been going overboard notifying everybody, and they’re clearly still in the midst of that notification process.I personally have received twenty three individual email notifications of this Google policy change so far. Perhaps I have more Google accounts than the average person, but it sure seems to me like they’re notifying everyone. I’d be surprised if anyone were really caught off guard by this policy
Okay, so it should be obvious to everyone nowadays that email addresses die. They go dormant because the users on the other end of that mailbox have given up on that mailbox; haven’t checked it in a long amount of time, for whatever reason. That’s an easy question to answer.The harder question is, when do email addresses die? Or when do internet service providers (ISPs) and mailbox providers (MBPs) deactivate inactive email accounts? That varies greatly. By ISP/MBP and by scenario. And not every mailbox provider wants to publicize this information. But here’s what we do know.Google recently announced that they’ll retire dormant accounts after two years of inactivity, and have been emailing every single Google user about this to let them know.Comcast indicates here that if you’re no longer a paying Comcast customer, you get to keep your email address — as long as you accessed it at least
Google is saying that as early as December 2023, they’re going to start retiring inactive accounts. Meaning, if you haven’t signed into your Google account in at least two years, Google could shut down that account, meaning you’d be saying goodbye to that Gmail email address.This means that eventually, bounce rates to gmail.com addresses will start to go up. This itself isn’t a bad thing, but it does give Google another way to compare good senders and bad senders — if you’re sending mail that has a higher bounce rate than others, you’re less likely to be a good sender, and this could end up contributing to a poorer sender reputation (and deliverability issues). This was the case with other ISPs in years past, though it’s unclear to me exactly how commonly this is part of the reputation equation today.THAT all means that it’s important that you monitor for hard