What Email Providers do Poker Copilot Customers Use?

I’m in a hotel room in Laos; the Chinese New Year starts in a couple of hours. That seemed like a perfect time and place to answer a question nobody had asked until yesterday: what email companies do Poker Copilot customers use?

Why is this a question? It’s because customers who use hotmail.fr often don’t receive the email we send with license key info. Hotmail.fr enthusatiatically decides that our messages are spam and often our French customers who use hotmail.fr are denied the chance to receive their license key. While talking about this with Alex, our QA guy, we asked ourselves how many people actually use hotmail.fr, whether the number is dropping, and whether we should spend much time working out what exactly is causing this problem.

So here are the numbers:

%, Email provider

38%, gmail.com
12%, hotmail.com
5%, yahoo.com
4%, hotmail.fr
3%, me.com
2%, mac.com
2%, yahoo.fr
0%-1% each, hundreds of others

Gmail dominates, being used by more people than hotmail and yahoo combined.

But 3% for me.com and 2% for mac.com? Those numbers look odd. Because me.com and mac.com are two obsolete attempts from apple to do what’s now called cloud computing for consumers. Both have been replaced with iCloud. Clearly this data is unduly influenced by an older state of affairs. Nothing stays still on the Internet; what’s relevant information for five years ago is misleading for today.

So let’s only look at data for the last twelve months. Let me work out the syntax in MySql for date comparisons…I never recall the specific way to do this for a particular SQL engine. Ah, here it is.

%, Email provider

43%, gmail.com
10%, hotmail.com
6%, hotmail.fr
3%, me.com
2%, yahoo.fr
2%, yahoo.com
0%-1% each, hundreds of others

That’s better: mac.com is gone altogether.

So gmail.com has gained, but hotmail.fr together still have a significant 6%. So, it seems it is worthwhile making the changes that will make hotmail co-operate better with our license key emails.

(Aside: it makes me kind of sad that gmail.com keeps moving ahead. It is getting dangerously close to monopoly status, and who can compete against a massive company that offers an excellent email service for free? I use gmail myself, but still feel something is not good with this market domination.)

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Postscript: I asked Margherita, our customer support agent if this problem was still happening: were hotmail.fr addresses still filtering our license key emails as spam? It turns out this is no longer happening. Well, there was a bunch of investigation and writing that turned out to be unnecessary!