Excite Retired Its Email Service … What Are We Doing About It?

With the retirement of Excite’s email operations at the end of August, many were positioned to find themselves without access to their long-held email accounts … or were they? Learn what our data told us about the state of Excite’s email service pre-shutdown and what we’re doing about it for our customers.

Excite Email: A Recent Snapshot

With the sudden shutdown, the TowerData team decided to do a little research into the recent popularity of Excite’s email domain.

Upon investigating, as expected the domain had extremely low volume and represents only 0.01% of our API traffic for the past 3 years.

To put this into context, over the last 3 years, Gmail averages just over 50% (and growing) of our API traffic, followed by Yahoo at 15% and then Hotmail at 9%.

With market share this low, it’s easy to see why IAC decided to terminate the service.

How is TowerData responding?

Our goal is to ensure we give clients the full picture when it comes to their email data, so they can mail confidently without worrying about sending to invalid and risky email addresses. As a result, we’ve updated our Email Validation service to reflect the change with Excite emails, namely marking them as “invalid” status code 325.

This means if you run a list through our Email Validation service, you will see an “invalid” status returned next to any excite.com email addresses, and it’s effective immediately.

But this is nothing new for the TowerData team – we’re constantly evaluating domain validity by communicating with our proprietary domain database and using instant MX checks to immediately identify invalid data. To put it simply, we like to stay on top of domain status changes and other dynamic factors to provide our customers with the most accurate validation results.

Learn more about our Email Validation service and sign up for your free account to test validate 100 emails for free!