As a business owner and a domainer, I have never been a fan of the new GTLDs because of the headache it gives me when I think about actually using them as a URL in the real world. Explaining them to people you meet in the normal course of a business day. The leakage of traffic when advertising and marketing. Just the whole confusion they create when explaining or navigating to the URL. However, that pales into insignificance when you take into account the business disruption and security risk of not receiving emails by them going to the dot com version.
So just how much of a problem is email security?. I have a dot com version of a dot co uk being used by a business actively and wondered how many emails get lost just by the confusion of .com and co.uk; this can be increased by 5 fold in my book when you use say a new gTLD – green.cars (loss to greencars.com greencars.ccTLD plus the non-plural versions).
Godaddy has a feature whereby you can catch all emails sent to that domain and forward all to one email address. I have never used the .com for many years and it was very easy to separate emails intended for the .com from emails intended for the business running on .co.uk
The results are shocking and I will provide a screen shot of those emails received just in the morning. But in conclusion in one 24hour period, these emails were for the business residing on .co.uk.
1 email from a national newspaper to the CEO
3 requests for quotations
1 internal system password confirmation email from the IT department!
2 purchase order confirmation
10 inspection reports
18 just general emails some personal about dinner date
Just the morning emails only!
This is the biggest hurdle the new GTLDs face, any serious business wouldn’t touch them without having the .com The time and confusion wasted by not receiving these intended emails out weigh any savings by buying the cheaper gTLD.
July 24th, 2017 at 3:03 pm
Have you checked out Mailbox Park? Easier than setting up GoDaddy catch all and they’ll pay you for the data.
July 24th, 2017 at 4:00 pm
One of the best articles about domains ever.
Should be featured at every mainstream media.
July 24th, 2017 at 7:01 pm
Very good point. One must also look at the negative, long term marketing implications. It’s hard to write your domain in a sentence if its not .com, net, org as a material percentage of people will think its a misplaced period. With so many extensions not sure how long that issue would take to resolve. Maybe.Never.
And then you have email marketing issues. The domain name in which sends you the email is important to many people for security reasons. When you get a marketing email from a non .com email address it often looks fishy because so many scams are perpetrated from cheap non .com domains.
July 24th, 2017 at 8:34 pm
Yes @R P and the spam feel is only increasing daily as most peoples contact with them is unwanted emails
July 24th, 2017 at 7:11 pm
Unfortunately, the issue you’ve highlighted may have more to do with email usage in general and less to do with gTLDs.
What’s the answer if someone types first.name@domain.com instead of firstname@domain.com ? The issue is similar.
You pointed out that you have the .com version of a co.uk domain name. Well, co.uk is a subdomain of .uk. The business that is based in the UK is using a .co.uk email address. Is that wrong?
The problem you highlight can occur with a .net, .org, .biz, .mil etcetera.
The answer is public education. And, also IT staff.
A little extra care or caution goes a long way.
July 24th, 2017 at 8:31 pm
That’s a very good point @Inland. I should point out the UK company is very much international facing and it is expected in the UK if you are a company selling internationally .com is the natural TLD to use. I’m sure if it was a UK company selling retail only in the UK the leakage would be very much less to the .com.
I can’t test a new gTLD but one can assume I’m getting emails intended for the .co.uk because the sender has got confused with the TLD; this can only be greater with the newGTLDs given the lack of awareness. I think this issue will be the reason newGTLDs will never go mainstream.
August 14th, 2017 at 3:32 pm
I also agree with @Inland. The problem isn’t the gTLDs as it has also happened with other extensions.
August 24th, 2017 at 9:58 am
I do agree with @Inland , in Mexico we used to use .com.mx then came the .mx but many people also use the .com, if people write an email by looking at the business card, they would inherently type the address as a .com.mx, a .mx or a .com depending on their personal preferences, for example if their own business is a .com, it’s just sometimes lack of attention (one company has a .com.mx and my marketing agency has a .mx) and not directly related to the TLD.