Michael Cyger amplified a post that offers a look into a massive pitfall for operators on non .com domain names as well as off-brand domain names. Misdirected emails, also known as email leakage, is an issue many business operators don’t even know about or understand until it becomes a problem. See for yourself:
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"Domain suffix familiarity bias"
Where people append ".com" to a domain name because of mind share, habit or assumption.
It’s real. https://t.co/iAn98kzSXL
— Michael Cyger (@MichaelCyger) May 9, 2024
Several years ago, I closed a nice deal on a .com domain name that was acquired by the venture funded company operating on the .CO domain name. My negotiation counterpart revealed that his company was having email deliverability issues. According to him, forms were not accepting his company’s .CO email domain names, and almost certainly, people were sending emails to my .com domain name instead.
If a company is not receiving emails from potential clients, they may never even know their emails are being misdirected. They may not have their head in the sand, per se, but they don’t know what emails may be going missing. In addition, sensitive emails may end up in the hands of unaffiliated parties.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of catch-all emails on my domain names. I don’t want anyone to think I am holding emails hostage because people are misdirecting emails to my domain name instead of the intended person. That’s just me though. There are plenty of people who do collect these emails and some may even use them as a selling point. I think that can be a very bad idea, but I digress. In fact, John Berryhill wrote about using catch-all email and anyone considering it should read that thread first.
Companies using alternative domain extensions or off-brand domain names should understand the risk of doing so, and email is a big part of that equation.
