Jamie Zawinski, aka jwz, owns DNA Lounge and DNA Pizza in San Francisco. He's also part of internet history, as one of the first employees of Mosaic Communications (later Netscape), the entity responsible for the Netscape browser. Which was kind of a big deal at the time, if you're old like me and were around then. His blog is a must read (and don't miss the gruntles) if you'd like to fall down a sarcastic nerd hole.
Anyway, what about email? He just posted a domain breakdown from (approximately) the last two years, and I thought I would share it here:
67%: gmail.com
13%: yahoo.com
4%: hotmail.com
2%: icloud.com
1.2%: aol.com
0.8%: comcast.net
0.6%: sbcglobal.net
0.6%: me.com
10.8%: everything else
This alone is not super newsworthy to me; it roughly mirrors what we see in the B2C universe elsewhere. But it's good to see the data point, and it does highlight something unexpected: A fair number of email addresses associated with Apple IDs (or Apple Pay) are clearly invalid and Apple doesn't seem to have successfully verified them. Sure, garbage gets through, but jwz rightly points out that letting through TLDs that don't exist (.con) is some sloppy work. I wonder if this reflects current state of Apple ID creation or if these are all legacy accounts and wouldn't be creatable now. Regardless, it's a reminder that even addresses passed through a signup/pay mechanism like this are not always guaranteed to be accurate.
Jamie Zawinski, aka jwz, owns DNA Lounge and DNA Pizza in San Francisco. He's also part of internet history, as one of the first employees of Mosaic Communications (later Netscape), the entity responsible for the Netscape browser. Which was kind of a big deal at the time, if you're old like me and were around then. His blog is a must read (and don't miss the gruntles) if you'd like to fall down a sarcastic nerd hole.
Anyway, what about email? He just posted a domain breakdown from (approximately) the last two years, and I thought I would share it here:
This alone is not super newsworthy to me; it roughly mirrors what we see in the B2C universe elsewhere. But it's good to see the data point, and it does highlight something unexpected: A fair number of email addresses associated with Apple IDs (or Apple Pay) are clearly invalid and Apple doesn't seem to have successfully verified them. Sure, garbage gets through, but jwz rightly points out that letting through TLDs that don't exist (.con) is some sloppy work. I wonder if this reflects current state of Apple ID creation or if these are all legacy accounts and wouldn't be creatable now. Regardless, it's a reminder that even addresses passed through a signup/pay mechanism like this are not always guaranteed to be accurate.
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