• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, July 31, 2023

Gmail announced earlier this year that it will begin deleting accounts that have not been signed into for two years. Yahoo Mail has gone even further, cutting off those that have been inactive for one year, and this policy dates back to 2013.  

Yahoo bluntly states: “After 12 months or more of not using your mailbox is considered inactive.” 

The question is: What does this mean for marketers?

Here are some answers from Haydee Fernandez, associate director, customer benchmarking & recommendations at Cendyn.

One risk is of account cutoffs is hard bounces. This can harm delivery rates and metrics such as the click-through rate.

Then there is the danger of “hitting recycled spam traps or unintentionally violating international spam laws such as CASL and GDPR,” Fernandez writes on hospitality.net.  

Finally, retired inactive email addresses become available to new users, so there is a risk that if an email address turns over quickly, a campaign can be marked as spam by the “unintended subscriber.” 

Why are the email providers doing this? Freeing up storage space is one reason. But the main issue appears to be security. 

Google’s internal analysis shows that “abandoned accounts are at least 10x less likely than active accounts to have 2-step-verification set up,” a recent Google blog post states.

It adds: “Once compromised, they can be used “for anything from identity theft to a vector for unwanted or even malicious content, like spam.”

Lapsed members will “stop receiving new emails, and all mailbox contents, folders, contacts and settings are permanently deleted,” it adds. 

Marketers have to be careful when trying to mitigate the problem.  

“While inactivity with a Yahoo email account differs from inactivity with an email subscription, they appear the same to marketers analyzing their email analytics,” Fernandez  warns. 

Maybe so. But the deleted email account could just as well belong to an active buyer who engages with the brand through social media or via a new email address in another service.  Either way, it’s dangerous to send emails to the old address.  

Fernandez advises that hotels in particular should “regularly re-engage subscribers throughout the year, rather than only once, to grow and maintain an engaged email list.”

Meanwhile, Google is offering enhanced security to all 1.8 billion Gmail account users. 

“I got my pop-up notification while checking my email this week and was surprised because it relates to something that’s been around for three years,” Davey Winder, co-founder, Straight Talking Cyber, writes on Forbes.

Winder says: “First launched for Chrome in 2020, Google’s enhanced safe browsing feature is a worthy addition to the security arsenal of the average user. It’s an automated function that sits in the background to offer proactive protection from phishing and malware threats alike.” 

As Google states, “Enhanced Safe Browsing keeps you safe when you’re signed in and improves your security in Google Chrome and Gmail,” Winder points out.

Why now? Perhaps because of sensitivities over privacy. 

“The original enhanced safe browsing for Chrome announcement of the feature from 19 May 2020, says that ‘Chrome will also send a small sample of pages and suspicious downloads to help discover new threats against you and other Chrome users,’” Winder writes. 

But he notes that “the information is only temporarily linked to your account and ‘after a short period’ the data is anonymized according to Google.”