You may have noticed that Mindbaz allows you to define an email expiration date in your send classifications. Here's an explanation of what it is, why you should use it and what we hope to achieve.
Why should I care about email expiration dates?
It has become clear that most commercial and marketing emails become obsolete within days of their date of reception. All of these undeleted emails stay in the recipient's inbox and become costly in terms of energy. They take up space in data centers, consume energy for storage, etc. And it's not great for the planet!
In order to reduce the carbon footprint of these emails, the Email Expiration Date Initiative was created by a group of email experts in France. The idea is to help Mailbox providers give us ways to clean up our emails. The first action is to allow senders to define when their email will become obsolete, which is done through a header. Then Mailbox providers will be able to offer recipients ways to automatically delete those emails.
It is essential to involve all email actors in reducing our impact on the environment. Senders, ESPs and Mailbox providers all need to participate.
You can find more information about the initiative and a list of all the actors that support it on the zerocarbon.email website.
How do I define an email expiration date?
From the Mindbaz platform, you can define an expiration date when you create or edit a Send Classification.
In the first step "Settings", under "Email expiration date", you can indicate the number of days after which your email can be automatically deleted. (Minimum of 15 days)
When you assign this send classification to a campaign, the expiration date that you indicated here will be assigned to the emails of that campaign.
Will the expiration date be taken into account?
We are still in the early days of the initiative. It will be up to the Mailbox Provider to decide whether or not, and how, to allow their users to use this expiration date to automatically delete obsolete emails. Certain Mailbox Providers have already expressed their support for the project (zerocarbon.email).
In sum, we need everyone's involvement for the initiative to be a success and to reduce our email carbon footprint! Use the email expiration date in Mindbaz and become a part of the movement.