Over many years I have collected lot many email contacts from friends, colleagues and other associates. At the year end you send a lot of mails to people on your contact list. I am no different.
While sending these mail I did lot of consolidation and filtering on my email contacts. While doing that I have noticed that I have more email addresses on some domains then others. Here is the breakdown of the domains –
| Service | email Ids | % |
| Gmail | 230 | 26.68 |
| Hotmail | 111 | 12.88 |
| Yahoo! | 95 | 11.02 |
| RediffMail | 22 | 2.55 |
| Others | 404 | 46.87 |
| Total | 862 |
After sending the greetings emails, as expected I got many bounces for many email addresses. These bounces are expected as people leave company and their company email IDs are removed. I collected all the email addresses from the bounces to clean my contacts as there is no point in keeping the invalid/non-existent email IDs. I found total of 108 invalid email IDs.
I was expecting mostly email IDs from company domains. However, looking at their domains I found some surprising results
| Service | Invalid Ids | % |
| Gmail | 9 | 8.33 |
| Hotmail | 30 | 27.78 |
| Yahoo! | 8 | 7.41 |
| RediffMail | 2 | 1.85 |
| Others | 59 | 54.63 |
| Total | 108 |
As you can see almost 28 % of the people has abandoned their Hotmail ID! Also, since GMail is late entrant in this space and it has gained a lot of market share and it seems GMail is gaining ground from Hotmail.
It would be interesting to know the result from your contact list and see if the above stats has any meaning.
Random Thoughts 