Customer Emails Sent to the .com That Is Not Yours

A purchase order that never arrived

A customer phones to ask why nobody has answered the order she emailed last Tuesday. Nobody at the office has seen it, and it is not in the spam folder.

She reads out the address she used, and the trouble is in the last three letters. Your business is on .ca, and she typed .com.

The .com belongs to someone else entirely, an unrelated company in another country.

Her order, with prices, quantities and her phone number, went to them or to nowhere, and she had no way of knowing which.

Why people type .com

Most of the addresses people type every day end in .com, and habit finishes the address before attention catches up. A .ca looks unusual to anyone outside Canada, and to plenty of people inside it.

The mail program then makes it worse. Once a message has gone to the wrong address, autocomplete remembers it and offers it first the next time the customer starts typing your name.

So one slip becomes a habit the customer never chose. Every later message follows the first to the same wrong place, until someone corrects the address book.

Where those messages go

What happens next depends on how the .com is set up for mail:

• No mail service at all: the message bounces, sometimes at once and sometimes a day or more later.
• Mailboxes for named people only: a message to a name that does not exist there bounces.
• A catch-all mailbox: every message, to any name, lands in a stranger's inbox.
• A matching name: if they also use a box called info or orders, a real person there receives it.
• A parked domain: mail may be accepted and thrown away, with no bounce at all.

Only the first two tell the customer anything, and a bounce written in mail server language is easy to ignore. In the other cases the message simply disappears from your side.

What strangers receive

The messages that go astray are not random. They are quotes, purchase orders, invoices and delivery addresses, the things customers send when they are about to do business.

Most people who receive such messages delete them, and a courteous few reply to say so. Either way, details your customers meant for you are sitting in a stranger's mailbox.

Card numbers should never travel by email in the first place. Saying so on invoices, and offering another way to pay, protects customers whichever address they type.

Finding out who holds the .com

A WHOIS lookup, offered on any registrar's site, shows who registered the .com, through which registrar, and which nameservers answer for it. A privacy service, if one is listed, usually passes messages on.

The domain's mail records, called MX records, show whether any server accepts mail for it. Your web developer or host can look them up in a minute and tell you which of the cases above applies.

Check whether the .com shows a website as well. An active business, a parked page with a for-sale notice and an empty domain each call for a different response.

A worked example

A green coffee importer in Richmond buys beans from growers abroad and sells them by the sack to roasters across Western Canada. Orders, contracts and invoices all travel by email.

Twice in one season a roaster chased an order that had never arrived. Both times the roaster's sent folder showed the .com, typed from habit and then repeated by autocomplete.

The lookup showed that the .com belonged to an active firm overseas with a catch-all mailbox, so nothing had bounced. The importer wrote to the firm, which agreed to answer stray messages and delete them.

The importer then changed its own side. Cards and signatures now show the full address with the .ca set clearly, and orders come in through a form on the website.

Invoices carry a line asking customers to reply rather than start a new message, and regular customers were asked to check the address saved in their mail programs.

A customer who replies or fills in a form never types the domain at all, and an address book corrected once stops offering the wrong address.

When the .com can be had

If the .com is unregistered, register it now and have its mail forwarded to your real addresses. That single step turns the slip into something that simply works.

If it is parked with a for-sale notice, ask the price. For a business whose customers type .com often, it may be worth more than it first appears.

An active business will not sell it. A short, courteous letter explaining the problem and asking them to return stray messages is usually all that is possible.

Changes on your own side

Write the address out in full wherever customers copy it: business cards, email signatures, invoices, quotes and the contact page. Make the .ca impossible to miss, not tucked into small type at the end.

Give customers ways to reach you that involve no typing. A form on the website, a reply to your own message and a link in your signature all carry the right address with no chance to slip.

When a customer says they sent something you never received, ask which address they used. That question finds the problem far sooner than a search of the spam folder.

The counter-case

For many businesses this happens rarely. Customers who mostly use the website's form, or reply to messages you send, may never type the domain at all.

Where the .com is unregistered, buying it and forwarding its mail ends most of the problem at once. The business can keep its .ca, which tells customers it is Canadian.

The case for acting is the nature of what goes astray. Even one misdirected quote or invoice a year is worth the hour it takes to check who holds the .com.

Checking the .com before the next lost order

1. Look up who holds the .com version of your domain.
2. Check its mail records to see whether it accepts mail.
3. Register or buy it if you can, and forward its mail.
4. Write to the holder if it is an active business.
5. Show the full address on cards, signatures and invoices.
6. Offer forms and replies so customers type less.
7. Ask which address whenever a message goes missing.

Step two tells you how urgent the rest is. A .com that bounces mail at least warns your customers; one with a catch-all mailbox delivers their messages to a stranger without a word.

Newsletters sent from a Yahoo address covers a related trap, where mail sent through a mailing service now bounces because of the address it claims to come from.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.