Spam traps, honeypots and trash domains
2. December 2013
A new, strategic partnership: Kickdynamic
24. July 2014
The Publicare email analysis 2014 for the USA
Which email provider is used most by United States consumers? Which cable company provides the most actively used email addresses? At which college do students show the most school spirit when it comes to their email addresses? And how many trash addresses are found in the average email distribution list?
For this email analysis, we evaluated more than 35 million anonymized email addresses – all of which were contained in real contact lists for B2C campaigns sent throughout the USA in 2013. We selected the data to analyze in such a manner that it represents a wide range of consumer products and diverse target groups.
The results
30.4 % of all the mailboxes are provided by Yahoo! – taking the number one spot ahead of Google (24.2 %) and Microsoft (15.5 %). To our surprise, AOL provided email accounts only represented 6.4 % of the sample data.
Yahoo! users are 29 times more likely to sign up with yahoo.com’s email service as opposed to Yahoo!’s ymail.com and rocketmail.com. Google users don’t have much of a choice and just use Gmail. Microsoft users are 7.4 times as likely to have a hotmail.com address as opposed to a msn.com address.
Among cable companies AT&T provides the most actively used email addresses (3.4%). AT&T (combined with its subsidiaries Southwest Bell and BellSouth) beat Comcast by .91 %. Time Warner Cable comes in third, behind by 2.06 %, followed by Verizon (0.9 %) and Cox Communications (0.8 %).
The University of Michigan (umich.edu) ranked number one amongst the most frequently used educational domain – showing that students at UM are most likely to use their university issued email address for communication other than strictly education related. Students in Michigan must really like their university issued email addresses because Michigan State University (msu.edu) came in a close second.
Merely 1 of every 22,727 email addresses is a trash-mail address. Almost 10 % of these trash-mail addresses contain the word “spam”.
In our infographic you will find the detailed overview of all relevant facts and figures of our email analysis.
Methods for Analysis
For this email analysis, Publicare evaluated more than 35 million different email addresses in anonymized data sets. All data sets originated from contact lists for U.S. consumer campaigns that were launched in 2013. Publicare selected the data to analyze in such a manner that it reflects a wide selection of consumer product ranges and target groups, to make it as representative as possible.