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Senders: What should you do about verizon.net?


As mentioned in a previous post, Verizon recently announced that it is getting out of the email hosting business.

Verizon users are being given a choice. They can:
  • Give up their verizon.net email address; or
  • Continue to use their verizon.net email address, but it will now be hosted by AOL.
Note also that Verizon has yet to announce a deadline as to when users will have to make this choice.

What does this mean for senders? What should senders "do" about verizon.net subscribers?

Truth be told, senders really shouldn't have to do anything here. The email domain verizon.net is not going away. Current users are going to be able to keep their existing email addresses. It is just that going forward, those email addresses will be hosted by AOL.

If a user chooses to give up their verizon.net email address, mail to that address with eventually start bouncing. Any good list management software or ESP platform should be able to denote those bounces and suppress that email address, after it goes dormant. There really shouldn't be any negative impact to email deliverability.

Even if senders wanted to do something with this segment of subscribers -- there isn't much they could do. You could email all of your verizon.net subscribers today, but what would you tell them? You don't know which ones plan to keep their email address and which ones plan to move.

I think all senders really need to do here is:
  1. Keep your regular mailing cadence;
  2. Make sure you have an easy "update your email address" process as part of your email footer; and
  3. Make sure your email platform automatically recognizes and suppresses no-longer-valid email addresses.
Beyond that, really, no special action is needed.

ETA: There's certainly no harm if you want to send all verizon.net users an email message asking them if they want to update their email address. I think it all boils down to how much effort you want to put forth to try to save a percentage of a percentage of users. How big the value you'll get from that is really impossible to measure without doing it. That's why my guidance is to just let the email platform work it out for you.

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