For nearly two years, Laposte.net has been monitoring the “Expires:” fields in emails received by the French webmail service. Now it’s Orange’s turn to launch this monitoring of expiration dates in its messaging system.

As we aim to give a significant boost to the project in the coming months, this will be an opportunity to see these figures gradually evolve and to try to obtain data from other players.

Our current priority objectives:

  • Advertisers: Help them implement expiration dates in their emails when their solutions allow it.
  • Email service providers: Lobby them to integrate the expiration functionality into their solutions.
  • Mailbox providers: Engage them to take an interest in the project and monitor the volumes of expiration dates already present in emails (obviously, the goal is for them to use the dates to enhance the cleaning functionalities of their solutions).

What are the insights from the figures provided by Orange and Laposte.net?

  • Orange – Each day, about 6% of the emails received by Orange have an “Expires:” header.
  • Orange – This represents more than 10 million emails received per day that contain an expiration date.
  • Orange – About 20 TB would be saved per month if Orange deleted all expired emails.
  • Orange – Half of the emails have an expiration date set to 2 weeks after the sending date.
  • Laposte.net – In the first 5 months of 2024, 2.4% of emails contain an expiration date.

Together, let’s improve these figures to prove to the entire email ecosystem that it’s worth it!

Support the project! Implement, document, communicate!

Thank you to Axelle Allouch from Orange, Ariane Journiac from La Poste, and Benjamin Billon for their involvement.