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

[Mark Datysgeld]

Interesting.

This was not within the scope of the study, but since a test had been 
performed anyway, we ended up including it.

To be honest, we did consider early on checking for this support using 
the test mailboxes, but that in itself presents issues, seeing as at 
times you register on a website that has the domain "test.com", but the 
e-mail arrives at your mailbox from "example.com". This happened quite a 
few times, actually. Other websites just don't send confirmation 
messages even when you directly interact with their forms. This seemed 
really inconsistent to track across a dataset of 1.000 entries, so the 
idea was dropped.

It's always good to engage in constructive discussion, but we do need to 
close this document for distribution, so can we agree on removing the 
eai paragraph for now and taking this matter to the Measurements group 
for future discussion?

Regards,

On 17/07/2019 12:46, John Levine wrote:
> In article <03c069fb-bf3c-d907-6617-7f64151b3552 at governanceprimer.com> you write:
>> -=-=-=-=-=-
>> -=-=-=-=-=-
>>
>> John,
>>
>> 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

-- 
Mark W. Datysgeld from Governance Primer [www.markwd.website]
Representing businesses in IG together with AR-TARC and ABES