Gmail purge announcement

Google is beginning to purge email addresses that aren't recently used:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/inactive-google-account-deletions-start-december-1/

There's little to nothing for a company to do, however.

Tracy Schneider said:

Are you taking any proactive steps to get ahead of it in case it dramatically spikes hard bounces?

What would you do?  From our perspective this is a good thing, since it will take clearly unused email addresses out of our distribution lists.

• Avoid sending to these email addresses, since they’ll start to hard bounce and may be turned into recycled spam traps.
• Consider a re-permission or re-engagement campaign to see if subscribers are still interested in hearing from you.
• Take cues from purchases, cart abandon/browse, or even in-store visits to know who’s loyal to your brand—use that to fuel sending decisions.

But how would you know who these people are?  Google certainly isn't going to give that information out.

I heard about it in an Oracle webinar on Friday. I'm with Gawain - since Google is just dumping inactive addresses, it shouldn't affect us (especially if we are already isolating inactive emails).

I'm interested to know if people are still writing 'Opens' back to Tessitura, given some of the big email providers are automatically marking emails as 'opened' (I think Apple Mail does this - so you can potentially believe you have a 100% open rate).  We're trying to remove people who haven't interacted / clicked on a link in the past 5 years, but I'm interested to know how others are isolating inactive emails.  We'll be keeping an eye on our hard bounce numbers tho' in the meantime. 

I disabled it as soon as WordFly provided us with an easy option to do so. I also no longer provide Opens as a response stat within any reporting, as it's now more or less only an indicator that an address is still connected to an active inbox--that's not engagement.

Yep indeed!