[UA-discuss] [UA-Measurement] Request for review: Report on Evaluation of Websites for Acceptance of E-mail Addresses, 2019

[John Levine]

In article <03c069fb-bf3c-d907-6617-7f64151b3552 at governanceprimer.com> you write:
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>John,
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>I am confused. I got these statistics from a test you ran yourself in 
>April following up on a request made by Don. From your e-mail: "Of those 
>[domains] I found MXes for 862 of them, and 414 of the domains had mail 
>servers that support EAI. As you can see from this summary, 85% those 
>have mail hosted at gmail, 10% at Microsoft."

It's not measuring the same thing.  I looked at the corporate inbound
mail servers, but for your tests it's the outbound e-commerce or CRM
mail servers that matter.  Other than in the tiniest organizations,
they're rarely the same.  Unfortunately, there's no way to test those
latter servers other than by signing up and getting them to send you
something.

FYI, I did that test for Don in about half an hour by tweaking my
existing tools that sample TLD zone files.  If it had been a lot of
work I would have told him it wasn't worth the effort since it doesn't
tell us very much.

One thing this discussion does tell us is that the next time around it
would be a good idea to have someone with mail experise on the testing
team who can check the tests and reports for these kinds of issues.

R's,
John