Overview
There are approximately 146 million people in Russia and, as of 2022, there are approximately 112 million internet users.
Market landscape
Mail.ru is the most widely used mailbox provider in Russia, followed by Yandex, Gmail and Rambler.
- Mail.ru: The Russian webmail service, Mail.ru, was launched in 1998. With more than 100 million active email accounts and 400 million total mailboxes, Mail.ru is the largest webmail provider in Russia and on the European continent, and it is the fifth largest mail provider in the world.
- Yandex: Yandex is a mailbox and search engine provider based in Russia that has one of the most sophisticated email applications in the world. In Russia, Yandex has 20% of the email market and 65% of the search engine market. It also has been actively penetrating Turkey, where it has captured 15% of the email market and 5% of the search market. Yandex has over 300 million email user accounts.
- Rambler: Rambler was launched in 1996 and is owned by the Rambler Media Group and Prof-Media. It offers search, email news and e-commerce services and is supported with other media web properties. Rambler has over 100 million user accounts.
Market share in Russia is as follows:
|
Mailbox provider |
Market share (%) |
|
Mail.ru |
48.7 |
|
Yandex |
32.5 |
|
Gmail |
13.6 |
|
Rambler |
5.1 |
|
Outlook.com |
0.17 |
|
Yahoo |
0.07 |
|
AOL |
0.01 |
Legal considerations
There are no current federal spam laws to combat spam in Russia, but there are laws concerning data privacy that senders should know about prior to sending email to Russian mailbox providers.
Filter technology
- No information
Complaint feedback loops
Best practices
Russian mailbox providers have a strong focus on sending reputation and engagement. For senders with poor sending reputations, they will automatically divert email traffic to the spam folder in most cases. Many will also throttle mail before they deliver to the spam folder to help fight traffic from malicious spammers.
Recommendations:
- Confirmed opt-in consent methods are preferred and highly recommended. Senders should not use any form of automatic opt-in method nor any kind of opt-out methods such as list purchases or list harvesting. Using confirmed opt-in is the best consent method to ensure subscribers want to receive a sender's email.
- Use list-unsubscribe headers for all emails. Employ a one-click unsubscribe process and unsubscribe an address after a hard bounce.
- Authenticate your email with Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC).
- Associate your From: address with your brand to make it easier to identify you with industry authentication methods.
- Closely monitor blocklists.
- Ensure your DNS records are valid, including rDNS.
- Don't use URL shorteners such as bit.ly.
- Warm up new IP address and new domains slowly to establish a sending reputation.
- Send relevant content that people want to receive. Russian postmasters consider engagement a good indicator of the relevance of a sender's mails.
Connection and throughput
Russian mailbox providers do not publish connection and throughput information, but all mailbox providers throttle mail in an attempt to keep spammers from reaching subscribers.
Blocklists and block removal
Mail.ru and Yandex use Spamhaus and Validity's RPBL blocklist. If you use confirmed opt-in consent and have strong list hygiene practices, it is unlikely that your IP or domain will land on one of these blocklists.
- Spamhaus: Spamhaus will give you further direction if your IP address is listed.
- RPBL blocklist lookup
- RPBL blocklist removal request
Postmasters
Both Mail.ru and Yandex have robust postmaster websites as well as programs that a sender can sign up for to help track their sending reputation.
