Every fourth letter from mailing lists in Russia goes to Gmail

Every fourth subscriber to email newsletters (25.32%) in Russia uses email with a foreign mail domain. This conclusion was reached by analysts of the Russian email newsletter service Unisender, who analyzed data from 1.5 billion letters sent through the company’s services in 2020–2023. The corresponding study is available to Vedomosti.

The main foreign email domain is gmail.com – 24.06% of letters were sent to such email addresses, service analysts calculated. Russians also register mailboxes on foreign domains icloud.com and hotmail.com, but they account for less than 1% of mailings. At the same time, 61.4% of letters from the mailing lists were sent to Russian postal services, in particular, 38.93% to mail.ru and 12.6% to yandex.ru. Another 10% comes from the services bk.ru, list.ru, inbox.ru, rambler.ru and ya.ru. The remaining 13.55% of letters were sent to corporate email, Unisender calculated.

Also, as a result of the Unisender study, they found that two thirds of email addresses (68.45%) are in the .ru zone, and the remaining part of users (31.55%) are in other domain zones com, net, by, de, etc. .

On July 31, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law prohibiting registration on Russian websites using foreign electronic mail services. From December 1, Russians will be able to register on such resources only by using the phone number of a Russian telecom operator, through the Gosuslug portal or the Unified Biometric System (UBS), as well as using information systems owned by a citizen of the Russian Federation or a Russian legal entity.

Earlier, the head of the Duma committee, Alexander Khinshtein, explained to Vedomosti that we are talking about Russian services, for example, VKontakte, or mail on Russian services, for example, mail.ru.

Russian postal services have existed for quite a long time, and initially Russians registered postal addresses on the same mail.ru or Yandex, says RAEC director Sergei Grebennikov. Mail on gmail.com, in turn, was used mainly for registering foreign subscriptions.

In 2022, when foreign services began to disconnect Russian users en masse, many of them began registering mailboxes on domestic domains, without waiting for foreign mail to be blocked and data lost, he argues. This is especially true for corporate users, he noted. This can explain the high share of Russian mailboxes in mailing lists, the expert believes.

At the same time, some users continue to use Gmail as their main email, and for spam mailings they create a second email with a Russian domain, but their share is insignificant, says Karen Kazaryan, director of analytics at ANO Digital Economy.