DTFake/Misspelled Email Addresses
I've been seeing fake or misspelled email addresses come through in my organization's email funnel.
For example, we have a bunch of email addresses where the domain name is misspelled or missing 1 character. (Ex: xxxxx@gmai.com, xxxxx@yaho.com, xxxxx@htmail.com)
The annoying thing is for some of these domains (gmai.com), I can see that our ESP successfully sends emails to that address. But there's never any engagement (probably because they're fake accounts: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/i277iLrV3ak)
The email doesn't bounce, and these fake email addresses don't get removed from our email list.
We're thinking our approach should be to create a manual suppression of these common "misspellings". But I'm wondering if anyone else has encountered this and how you've dealt with it.
Double opt-in would solve this problem since they'd need to confirm before you start sending to them :)
+1 to adding double opt-in. If you have the budget for it, adding an email verification service to your signup form should be able to catch misspelled domains like this, and not allow the person to submit the form until they correct the spelling.
To help with budget, you can follow this tutorial to set up an email validation script that checks for common domain misspells: http://andrewberls.com/blog/post/reducing-bad-signup-emails
That's a great demo - but in its current state you can still submit a invalid email address so to speak even if the hint is present. Any idea on how you could control it not to submit if the hint is present?
You could probably do something like return false, but the script isn't bulletproof so that may prevent false positives from submitting, so you'd need to consider that scenario. Dropbox and GitHub use this script to prompt the user to check their email when the move out of the email field, but don't prevent the user from choosing to continue.