40% of admin email addresses are unavailable

May 22nd, 2003
By Demys News Services

A recent mail shot carried out by SIDN - the Netherlands naming authority - to the official email contact for every .nl domain resulted in 40% being returned as undeliverable.

In January new rules and regulations relating to .nl domain names came into force (see:.nl open to everyone) and SIDN wanted to tell all .nl domain name holders about these changes. They therefore decided to send an e-mail message to all registrants (via the "admin-c contact" in SIDN jargon). A spin-off of the email shot was that it provided some interesting information about the split between functional and non-functional admin email addresses.

results of the mail-shot

The e-mail message went out to 603,476 unique admin-c e-mail addresses, but was ultimately undeliverable in 236,700 cases. In other words, 39.2 per cent of all the addresses were non-functional. In more than half of these cases, the message was undeliverable because there was simply no mail server in place for the relevant domain name. Other common reasons for non-delivery were that the user name was not recognised within the domain, that the mail server was not accessible, and that the DNS was incorrect.

consequences

If other domain spaces, such as .com, have the same proportion of incorrect or non-functioning admin. contact email addresses then the consequences to domain registrants could be massive.

Commonly, in most country code domains and generic domains such as .com, the administrative contact person is regarded as the domain name holder's representative who can make changes to the domain or authorise transfers. In addition, renewal notices may also be sent to this email address.

As well as missing out on the announcement of new terms and conditions and other administrative issues that may affect a domain, incorrect email details may have serious consequences. This is especially so in light of ICANN's reinforcement of their policy that requires all registrants to be contacted by their registrar to ensure all data on the WHOIS database is correct. If the WHOIS data is not correct the registrant may ultimately lose the domain if they cannot be contacted. (see: Businesses face losing domains under new rules).

In addition to this emphasis on enforcement of contact detail rules, evidence now shows that registrants also face the risk of domain name hijacking if they let a name that is 'running' the admin email contact of other domain names expire. Such inactive admin domains could be the reason for some of SIDN's emails bouncing. In the case of 2e.com the registrants allowed something similar to happen and were hijacked as a direct consequence, as Demys recently reported.

All in all, if this latest sample were to be replicated in other domain spaces it is certain that there are very large number of businesses around the globe who need to get their domains in order.