Re: [ietf-smtp] Possible cont4ibution to moving forward with RFC5321bis SMTP

[Laura Atkins <[e-mail]>]

> On 30 Dec 2019, at 15:24, Keith Moore <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On 12/30/19 8:31 AM, Laura Atkins wrote:
> 
>> 30% of email addresses on a marketing list go bad every year. It doesn’t seem that changing email addresses is that problematic.
> 
> Of course it is problematic, because any email address that is changed for that reason cannot be used as stable contact info for use between friends and colleagues.    And this degrades the utility of email.

This has been the case since 1999. 

> Of those 30%, I wonder how many of those addresses were addresses that people intended to use as stable addresses in the first place.   I wonder how many people obtain "throwaway" addresses specifically for the purpose of disclosing in contexts where they seem likely to be exploited by marketers, while reserving other addresses for use for mail that they want to get.

There has been published research on this. Which goes back to what Dave was saying - you really need to understand what has been done before you start proposing solutions. I have a copy of the .pdf, but you can search google to find it, too. The title is  "ISPs and Spam: The Impact of Spam on Customer Retention and Acquisition," Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn. June 14, 1999. 

> I also wonder how many people routinely get a "throwaway" email address on any rare occasion that they need to correspond with anyone over email, with the expectation that such correspondence will inherently be short term, because many people seem to treat email as a communications medium of last resort.
> 
> So I wouldn't assume that those 30% were addresses that people wanted to keep anyway.

The initial research was done on behalf of ISPs, not senders. 

> But yes, I'm aware that one of the ways that people deal with spam is by changing email addresses.     If spam as experienced by ordinary people were not so bad, causing them to change email addresses as a way of dealing with it, email would be more useful.

In 1999, the volume of spam was a tiny fraction of what it is today. And, yet, it was bad enough to cause 30% of people to abandon their email addresses. 

laura 

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