domains
Sometimes I’ve got big data to share, and sometimes I don’t. Since I don’t have big data today, I thought it would be fun to pause and take a look at a small bit-o-data to see what we all can learn from it. In the graphic above, you can see a breakdown of the top domains and mailbox providers as measured from my tiny little Spam Resource newsletter list. Just under 800 subscribers at the moment. It’s a niche list and different people with different audiences are going to show a different breakdown of domains and providers, but still, I see a lot of the same domains and providers that other folks see. A few notes: I organized the data both by domain and by provider. See how this changes things. I guess my newsletter would pretty much count as a B2B newsletter, as my target audience is email senders
Lumen Technologies, aka CenturyLink, absorbed Embarq, combined with Qwest, which acquired USWest (if you’ve really been around a while) and is a telecommunications provider come together from many parts, with bits of them descended all the way from Mountain Bell, Pacific Northwest Bell and Northwestern Bell, the latter being the predecessor company that ran the copper wires that eventually delivered DSL internet service to my Minneapolis apartment starting near the turn of the millennium. Fast forward to today, and they continue to provide consumer internet access in various locales across the USA, and that includes hosting consumer email services for those users across a number of domains. Those domains include:digisys.netcswnet.commebtel.netcenturylink.netq.comembarqmail.comgrics.netcenturytel.netqwest.netcoastalnow.netgulftel.comThe MX for these domains points at mx.centurylink.net, but if you connect on port 25 and read the SMTP banner, you’ll see “cloudfilter.net” which is actually Cloudmark. Thus, if you’re having spam-related deliverability troubles at CenturyLink, you’ve probably got a Cloudmark
As noted recently, Validity plans to start charging for ISP feedback loop complaint feeds. Free users will get some sort of aggregate dashboard that is perhaps similar to what one sees in Google Postmaster Tools, but it sounds as though there will be no individual complaints fed, and no opportunity to log or unsubscribe complaints or complainers.If some number of sending platforms decide not to pay this fee, and thus stop receiving spam complaint feeds, this is likely to have an impact on the email ecosystem. How much of an impact? To understand that, we should start by identifying the potential beneficiaries of ISP feedback loop complaints:The end user. In most cases, a “report spam” complaint results in that end subscriber getting unsubscribed from a particular sender. The mail stops. Now, the mail will not stop, perhaps allowing the user to report spam again and again, possibly causing more negative
Jamie Zawinski, aka jwz, owns DNA Lounge and DNA Pizza in San Francisco. He’s also part of internet history, as one of the first employees of Mosaic Communications (later Netscape), the entity responsible for the Netscape browser. Which was kind of a big deal at the time, if you’re old like me and were around then. His blog is a must read (and don’t miss the gruntles) if you’d like to fall down a sarcastic nerd hole.Anyway, what about email? He just posted a domain breakdown from (approximately) the last two years, and I thought I would share it here:67%: gmail.com13%: yahoo.com4%: hotmail.com2%: icloud.com1.2%: aol.com0.8%: comcast.net0.6%: sbcglobal.net0.6%: me.com10.8%: everything elseThis alone is not super newsworthy to me; it roughly mirrors what we see in the B2C universe elsewhere. But it’s good to see the data point, and it does highlight something unexpected: A fair number of email addresses associated with
Apologies for the clickbait headline! I couldn’t resist. My intent is to deceive, but only slightly. What is this all about? I was just reading Brian Krebs and his excellent recent reporting, summarizing and analyzing of data from The Interisle Consulting Group, which shows that domains in the “.us” TLD are amazingly prevalent in BEC (business email compromise/aka “phishing”) scams.What this has to do with deliverability is this: while in theory deliverability based on domain reputation is based on the send stats linked to your domain name, your choice of domain can indeed matter to some degree, because spam filters react to what they see. Some might do so with bayesian filtering, some might be manual rulesets updated by a person, or it could be some fancy new artificial intelligence coming to take our jobs someday (yay, Skynet!) — but any of them could, and some likely will, treat mail from domains
This is pretty neat. Writes Ben Lovejoy for 9TO5Mac: When configuring custom email domain settings on iOS, you can even buy a domain name directly from the iPhone. Kind of neat, if you’re mobile-first. And one assumes you’ll be able to access the resulting configured custom email account from desktop as well.
Australian telecommunications provider Telstra has long provided internet services (including email), initially via the “Bigpond” brand (launched in 1996, later retired). They’re reported to have 18.8 million customer accounts, though I don’t know how many active email accounts that translates to. Even if you assume a 1:1 correlation between user accounts and email accounts (which is unlikely), that’s still quite a bit smaller than, say, Yahoo Mail (which was reported as having 225 million active users as of 2017). Regardless, a multi-million subscriber base is nothing to sneeze at.I don’t have much information on blocking/unblocking information for senders with Telstra/Bigpond delivery issues at this time. I’ll add information here as I’m able to.In the mean time, if you are having a Telstra/Bigpond-related deliverability issue, and if you would like to segment out or suppress mail to the Telstra domains, here’s a list of their primary email domains:telstra.comtelstra.com.aubigpond.combigpond.com.auTelstra hosts email for
Here’s an easy tip that I wanted to share with everyone. It’s something I knew about myself but didn’t take into consideration (I guess I got tripped up in my own “do as I say, not as I do” kind of thing). As mentioned, recently I set up my own mailbox provider to host my own mail, and as part of that, I set up a new domain name. (I didn’t HAVE to set up a new domain name, but it made setup a bit easier; I could dedicate the whole domain to my new project, and I could simply jettison the domain if I decide to shut the service down later.)I set the server up and tried sending the first few test messages, and immediately started to see Spamhaus blocks. The error messages basically said something like “mail blocked due to domain being listed on zrd.dq.spamhaus.net.” ZRD? A quick
Who hosts the most inbound B2B email or mailboxes? I don’t have big data from a large email sending platform nowadays, so it’s not something I could easily answer from subscriber list data. In a perfect world, I’d love to look at thousands of B2B client email lists and analyze them by domain breakdown — and then roll up the domain breakdowns by MX record — to find a clear picture of an average of B2B email hosting provider across that client data.And I did that, once upon a time, where I used to work. When I crunched that data a few years ago, I found a lot of the usual suspects (Google, Microsoft), but I did not see a lot of depth with regard to actual mailbox provider services focused only on the business environment. That made it difficult to broaden the view of the B2B universe beyond the
Over on the Kickbox blog, my colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz talks about sending domains and what you need to think about if you want to share domains between multiple email provider platforms. It’s a common thing, right? You are probably using more than one service provider, CRM or automation platform. You’ve probably also got a corporate email system in the mix. Can you send from more than one platform using the same domain? And if so, should you? What are the limitations and concerns around using the same domain to send from multiple systems? Jen walks us through it.