To what extent does TLD affect email delivery?
Curious if anyone has any insights on this - to what extent does your choice of TLD affect email delivery? For example, if I chose .eu versus say .pw, would I see better email deliver ability? If I chose a gTLD like .win over .xyz, would I see worse email deliverability?
Should I strictly only use .org/.com/.net/western country TLD for my emails?
Comments
I'm no expert in this but I would have thought IP reputation along with DKIM/SPF/content all matter more than the domain itself.
I've read a few articles advising sysadmins to refuse delivery to any .pw domain, which worries me a bit since I don't want my stuff to be caught in a filter somewhere.
You mean your outgoing address? Spam filters use whatever probabilistic signals they can, and TLD is certainly one of them. Most mail coming from .biz is spam, so filters will weigh that in. You are probably best off with the traditional com/net/org or country codes that really do reflect where the sender is likely to be (.uk, .de etc. but not .pw).
It's a pricing game really.
As @willie pointed out, there are probabilistic actions at play. And spam filters adapt to these, based on the total number of spam being generated by the new TLDs.
Remember the gold rush when .info domains were less than a dollar for a while? It had turned to a point where even legit .info sites were spamboxing for no reason. This was because of the huge upsurge in spammers, churning out domain after domain to process the spam.
At this point, .pw is a dollar domain (And it was a spammer favorite back when it launched).
Now, I am not saying that your delivery depends entirely on your choice of extensions - DMARC (SPF/DKIM) + IP Reputation will go a long ways.
But don't be surprised if the big-freeboxes start dropping your emails.
I'd recommend TLDs and ccTLDs which have a higher reputation.
Plenty.
The amount of customers that I straight drop most of the spammy TLD's (.download, .top, crap like that) is obscene.
Francisco
Based on running / helping to run five MTA servers for a year (three personal, and two business), I'd guess that the type of emails being sent and their quantity might be more important than other factors, such as IP address, DKIM, DMARC, ARC, and maybe TLD.
All four servers that send (one just receives), send only individually written emails. They send no mass mailings. Through replies to our emails and through side channels of communication with our recipients, we know we get essentially 100% deliverability to Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo, Verizon, AT&T, and more.
All four sending servers now have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Initially, however, we seemed to get full deliverability with just SPF.
As to TLD specifically, two of our five servers are .com domains, two are .us, and one is .net. I quickly searched the mailop list (mailop.org) without easily seeming to find authoritative comment on the relative importance of TLD to deliverability. But, all four of our sending MTA servers are running on boxes from vendors who seem frequently mentioned on mailop as having reputations for failing to respond actively to email abuse complaints. That we get 100% deliverability coming from such providers' IP addresses suggests to me that using a .pw TLD might not impair deliverability at all.
So, if you just want to set up a personal email server, I'd encourage you to go ahead with the .pw domain. If you want to send significant quantities of email that your recipients will want to receive, then asking [email protected] or [email protected] might get you valuable help with planning.
Please do let us know what you decide to do and how it works out!
MetalVPS
I have a .pw domain and email sent from the domain is always filtered out
What about .co ltd?
@Emmet
I've seen mail servers that block the TLD .xyz outright by default (independently of whether spf, etc. are set up properly on the particular .xyz domain in question), but such mail servers usually send a return mail indicating this. Sometimes, one can write to the Postmaster of such a mail server and request that the particular .xyz domain be whitelisted, but sometimes, the Postmaster never replies, in which case, there's not much that one can do, unfortunately
"A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)
Even some sites block TLDs. Like I remember Facebook displaying captcha every time you would try to share a .xyz link.
There are certainly drawbacks to using an extremely cheap / free TLD.
SkylonHost.com High Bandwidth European Cloud KVM | AS202297
The TLD .xyz got off to a less-than-glamorous start back in 2014, when they basically gave away many .xyz domains and consequently attracted a lot of abuse, which gave .xyz a rather negative reputation.
Nowadays, I think that the situation with .xyz is objectively much better than it was five years ago,* but unfortunately, the TLD .xyz is still sometimes blocked as a result of the early abuse.
*See https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/ , where .xyz is 4.7% bad, which is not so much worse than .com at 4.3% bad.
"A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)
I still block quite a few TLD's simply because it helps a lot in decreasing spam -- and internal survey revealed that none the users had ever received any non-spam messages from these ... (I don't remember exactly, but .icu, .best, .men was certainly on the list, maybe monster and xyz etc.) I've done some tests with my own .xyz and .win domains, and deliverability is certainly lower than some ccTLD's and com/net/org ...
I will keep my 10 year .party / .win until it's time to renew. Then I'll probably be dead. If you're blocking based upon my TLD, that's RACIST!
My pronouns are asshole/asshole/asshole. I will give you the same courtesy.
Unless you want to change domains every year, I don't see the point of using .pw for a mail server (especially given its poor rep). From what I can tell .pw domains are only cheap for the first year. You're much better of picking a domain that is consistently affordable for things such as mail. Changing every year would be a major hassle.
I recently set up a mail-in-a-box using a .one domain (abuse levels around the same order of magnitude as national tlds) with a KVM from miniKVM.com and I have yet to have any issues. The biggest annoyance was the aggressive greylisting employed by MiaB.
Kimsufi KS-3, Mr.VM NAT128, InceptionHosting NAT256 Bundle, MiniKVM Mini+, Porkbun-powered domain
Running Nextcloud (DE), Mail-in-a-Box, OpenVPN, Teamspeak 3, Home Assistant (tutorials/scripts in links where available)
Not sure all TLD's are equally connected to race ...
Anyways, I also block my own .win and .xyz 