Many ways to write "Hotmail.com" :)

Today we went through are growing database in order to improve its quality. We had discovered that a lot of the e-mails we sent were being bounced because of non-existing addresses. That is not a good thing; mailing to non-existing receivers can be seen as an act of spamming. And that's something we want to avoid by all cost.

So we were looking at the giant log files of the mails we sent out over the last few days, as well as the warnings/errors they had generated. We found out that a lot of the e-mail addresses of our members were misspelled because of typos. Many of these people probably never even received their activation link after subscribing!

The obvious typos we corrected by hand. And what we noticed raised one big question: How many ways are there to misspell "hotmail.com"?! We will give you some of the ones we encountered:

• hotmail.com.be
• hotmail.co
• hotmeil.com
• htmail.com
• hottmail.com
• hotmaill.com
• hotamail.com
• otmail.com
• hotmaikl.com
• hptmail.com
• ...

No kidding, we actually found each and every one of the examples above!

Now, that may appear normal. After all, typos are only human. And these mistakes can easily be overlooked by anyone. But our question is: How come GMail addresses are being written correctly?! Sure, there are 7300 Hotmail users for only 2700 GMail users. But still. We corrected dozens of badly written Hotmail addresses, and only two (2!) badly written GMail addresses!

What explains this odd phenomenon? Well, we are still scratching our heads. We still have no clue. We are just guessing that "hotmail" is in fact a difficult word to write, where "gmail" clearly is not.

Any better explanation is by all means welcome!