dead domains
American broadband communications provider Sparklight, aka Cable One, provides service to 1.1 million residential and business customers across 24 states. However, as of July 14, 2022, they no longer provide email service to residential customers. The affected domains are: cableone.net newwavecom.net nwcable.net mycitycable.com Consider them all dead; the MX for these domains is no longer answering on port 25. [ H/T: Evan Burke. ]
Vodafone has shutdown the Italian vodafone.it and teletu.it email domains as of June 1, 2023, and has deactivated all mailboxes at both domains. The domains still have an MX record (as of June 26th) but neither MX is answering on port 25.If you’re an email sender, best to unsubcribe, suppress or delete addresses at this domain, in case they are ever resurrected in the future as spamtrap domains.More information can be found here.
European telecommunications provider Orange has shut down email services in Slovakia. This means that the email domain orangemail.sk is no more.Orange notified users here that as of November 1, 2022 it is no longer possible to send or receive emails or SMS messages via the Orangemail service, and that users can access and download any existing messages through December 31, 2022.[ H/T: Jakub Olexa of Mailkit ]
US telecommunications provider Hargray offers broadband internet “throughout the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and the Savannah region of Georgia,” according to Wikipedia.They’ve recently posted notice that they’re getting out of the email business, indicating that as of February 2023, they will no longer offer residential or business email.Here you’ll find a timetable of wind-down in their different service regions, with the process beginning in December, 2022.It seems possible that some hargray.com email addresses could remain valid, if they’re business addresses used by employees of Hargray — I’m not really sure. Best to reconfirm, retire, or request an updated address from any hargray.com subscribers in your list as soon as possible.[ H/T: James T. ]
The email domain love.com was previously owned by AOL, then Verizon, then Yahoo, as the email services and corporate oversight changed for the AOL/Yahoo email services. From the context, it sounds as though it was once possible to have an email address at the love.com domain name — but no longer. Email service for love.com was ended by AOL/Yahoo as of July 31, 2022.It looks as though the domain name love.com was sold to a new company, which was speculated to have netted the domain owner rather a large sum of money.As of October 2022, the domain love.com does currently have an MX record (pointing to Google), but any love.com addresses on a typical marketer’s legacy list is likely going to be from the AOL days and not up to date, so I recommend suppressing those addresses.Please feel free to leave your best “love is dead” jokes in the comments
Encrypted email service CTemplar has shut down as of May 26, 2022.Security website The Daily Swig reports that, “No reason was given for the closure of the service. However, it comes less than one year after a system failure meant that some customer data was ‘irrecoverably lost.'”It looks as though their primary email domain was likely ctemplar.com. They also supported custom domains and I see at least a handful of custom domains out in the wild in the dot com DNS zone that can no longer receive mail, as their MX records pointed to mail.ctemplar.com, which no longer exists. Best to suppress as much of this as your sending ESP or CRM platform can identify.
Maine telecom and internet provider UniTel is getting out of the email mailbox hosting business. It sounds as though the email domains will simply be shutdown (on November 1st) and not transitioned. Bummer, man.From their website: UniTel is discontinuing free email services by 11/1/22. You will no longer have access to your free @unitel.me or @bluestreakme.com emails as of 11/1/22. This is a necessary change to realign our service offerings to be more competitive. Customers can now drop phone services and subscribe to higher speeds of internet at a lower monthly cost.The coming shutdown has “irked” some customers.
The end of an era! Do you remember your first BlackBerry? I sure do, that big blue blob of a device with a fantastic keyboard and SSH that worked inside the work firewall (shh, don’t tell anyone) and was so easily integrated into work email that it hurt. (Sorry, T-Mobile Sidekick!)Anyway, it turns out that BlackBerry as a company still exists, and they were still hosting email for some customers. That’s coming to an end in January, 2022.From their website: “As another milestone in the BlackBerry journey, we will be taking steps to decommission the legacy services […], with an end of life or termination date of January 4, 2022. “[This includes] BlackBerry hosted email addresses – This includes the redirection of email sent to BlackBerry hosted email addresses to other email addresses used on other platforms, including Android and iOS. This includes @myblackberry.com or @service_provider_name.blackberry.com email addresses.”So, get ready to add…
Yahoo announced a shutdown of Yahoo Mail in China (yahoo.com.cn and yahoo.cn) to take place back in 2015. In 2019, the domains seemed to be resurrected, but they’ve since gone dead again, as the MX records for each domain point at nothing.And since Yahoo just announced that they are fully pulling out of China, you can consider that the final answer. That, as they say, is that.I’m guessing that the resurrection I stumbled across in 2019 might have had something to do with the transition of Yahoo Mail’s Chinese users to Alibaba? But I don’t have an easy way to confirm it, and at at this point, it doesn’t really matter, as there’s not much a sender can do about it today. (Were the Yahoo domains ever that big in China, anyway? I was always more concerned with delivery to qq.com, 163.com, 126.com, and a handful of others. Yahoo was…
As part of UPC’s sale of various assets to Vodafone, I am reliably informed that the domains upcmail.hu, chello.hu, and monornet.hu no longer host email users and should be considered retired. As of this writing, all still have MX records, but any attempts to mail those users will results in “550 5.1.1 MXIN501” errors.Thanks to Mailkit’s Jakub Olexa for this information!
