Email Deliverability May Still be Issue for XYZ (Updated)

At the end of my son’s soccer game on Saturday, one of the parents came up to the Assistant Coach and asked about the company on his sweatshirt. The Assistant Coach works at the company, and the other parent knew a couple of his colleagues. After their conversation ended and we walked off the field, I asked him if his company uses a .XYZ domain name.

The Assistant Coach looked surprised that I would know this, chuckled a bit, and confirmed that his company was the brand with the .XYZ domain name. Mind you, this is not one of the more well-known .XYZ users, but I happened to know of it because of some research I did in advance of launching Embrace.xyz.

After confirming, I told him I am familiar with .XYZ because the company sponsors my Pan-Mass Challenge ride every year. I also mentioned that it has become one of the most popular domain names for startups, and that has led to some fairly large domain name sales.

He then told me that they have serious issues with email deliverability. A lot of companies and/or email providers block .XYZ domain names or assume email from .XYZ domain names is spam. Our conversation was brief, but I thought it was interesting.

My uneducated assumption is that .XYZ domain names became a source of spam when they were super cheap to buy. Spammers could buy thousands of throwaway .XYZ domain names, use and abuse them, and dump them.

My domain investment portfolio is nearly all .com. In a very distant second place for me is .XYZ. I know the .XYZ team works hard to prevent abuse, but there is still work to be done to improve the email reputation.

Update: A representative from the .XYZ Registry shared this comment with me:

There is no data that supports this concern. Email reputation and deliverability is built on each individual sending domain, not the extension. Individuals can start with best practices here: https://www.spamhaus.com/resource-center/xyz-on-new-domains/.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

10 COMMENTS

  1. Elliot….i may have told you, but this is one of the reasons why I purchased Embraced.link to give to you if you want it. .LINK is no worse than .XYZ, and you and some of your followers should consider it.

    • Thanks for thinking of me. I don’t have any interest in .Link domain names, and the brands I am building are Embrace.com and Embrace.xyz – I do not think the past tense makes sense for me.

  2. .xyz, .top, .icu are some of the top spammy extensions. good luck getting any emails through on those. one of the down sides of selling your domains cheap.

  3. back to the basics—dot com is what again….reliable KING
    I read a report from a very reliable consumer magazine warning to their million readers to check the URL of the company they are dealing with esp when they get them in their emails and if it is not a dot com, it raises the red flag of being a spoof website.

  4. I disagree with XYZ’s statement that “Email reputation and deliverability is built on each individual sending domain, not the extension.” Each email platform has a choice on how they determine what to deliver to the inbox and what not to. If a domain extension is used for lots of spam, they can cut it off or change deliverability.

  5. “Our first moment of consternation came when we started getting anecdotal reports from our early customers that transactional emails, such as password resets, were winding up in their spam folders. This also happened occasionally with highly personalized work emails sent directly to contacts.”

    “Once we switched over to spotvirtual.com, not only did the anecdotal experience drastically improve, but we were able to quantify this based on some of our emails which were tracked. After switching, our initial email open rates rose from 70% to 86%, second email open rates rose from 50% to 72%, and overall meeting conversions rose from .1% to 3%! This improvement alone is worth the domain switch.”

    “we would occasionally get feedback from users and prospects that the .xyz domain felt unprofessional and that they would prefer to use an app with a different URL.”

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