We deliver a lot of emails. Our web hosting customers send an average of almost 40,000 emails per day. It is, therefore, essential that we have a robust email delivery system in place. We’re also focused on privacy, limiting the number of logs we wish to keep. However, we store anonymous email delivery statistics to allow us to improve and troubleshoot our email delivery system.
Emailing Days
There are no surprises here – more emails get set on working days than at the weekend. In fact, Monday – Friday, around 50,000 emails go out per day, dropping to around half that, at 27,000 on the weekend. The quietest day of the year is always Christmas Day, less than 6,000 last year.
Recipient Information
We only store the domain that mail is delivered to and have long been surprised at just how much email goes to a single place!
In 4th place, a stalwart of the free email world from 1997 – Yahoo! – receiving 2% of our outgoing mail.
In 3rd place, it’s the email addresses included with your internet connection. BTInternet, VirginMedia, Blueyonder etc. 7% of outgoing mail goes to these. Some of the brands have been extinct for a long time (Blueyonder merged with NTL in 2006 which in turn rebranded as Virgin Media in 2007) so people have had these addresses for some time. We rarely see AOL addresses these days but they were once very common!
Coming in 2nd place, the one that causes the most headaches for delivery, but does have very helpful staff – it’s Hotmail. Hotmail now sits under the Outlook brand, after being acquired by Microsoft back in 1997 and rolled into Outlook in 2012. Between them, they currently account for 9% of our outgoing mail.
If you’ve got this far, you’ve probably already guessed who comes in 1st place. Of course, it’s Gmail. Despite being the youngest of the group, launching in 2004, it’s now dominating our mail deliveries. They did report 1.5billion users in 2019 – a number that’s no doubt grown since. As a result, we’re seeing 42% of outgoing emails heading to Gmail accounts.
Other destinations
With 60% of all mail accounted for, any other domain accounts for less than 1% of our deliveries – but still 40% overall. These include the many fine individuals, clubs and businesses using our eco-friendly web hosting, and we love them all! Whilst free email accounts may be acceptable for personal use, your own domain always looks better. And for businesses, research has shown it can actually deter someone from contacting a business.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief look at our email delivery statistics. Email is still very important, choose a provider that does it properly.