We’re soon to lose our old Virgin Radio domain names, so we thought it would be a good idea to run some reports and see how we’re getting on with reducing the amount of incoming emails to those domains.

We were hoping that our system of bouncing emails back to the senders and asking them to resend them with the new address (whilst still cheekily forwarding them to the intended recipient) would help, and it seems to be working. We also thought that informing the users when somebody uses their old address would help users work out what contacts, mailing lists and automated services (Facebook, ahem) they still need to change.

This is what we found – a distinct reduction in incoming emails to these old domains since it was implemented.

So what’s the next step? Well, we’ll keep the current system running, run the reports regularly to monitor progress, then divert all mail to these old domains to a centralised mailbox (which our Service Desk will monitor) as soon as it’s appropriate. By this stage we are hoping that all emails will be of the variety that people would like to see the back of, but you never know!