Most users subscribe to email lists to receive a coupon or because they need to give their email to complete an order. After you have their email, it’s your job to convince them to remain subscribed. But, disposable emails eliminate this chance. Users regularly create these accounts to help section out their sales emails so they don’t clog their personal accounts.
Another reason subscribers might set up a disposable email account is to track sites and see which subscription is selling their information to lists. Once the user has discovered the site that’s been selling their information, they can unsubscribe and protect their inbox.
The increase in hacks and selling of information have made users more skeptical of where their information is going. Users are now hyper vigilant of the risks associated with unsecure emails and the threats they can make to a person’s private information. These emails serve as a layer of protection to the user.
While the thought behind setting up these emails is understandable, it doesn’t bode well for email marketers. As we’ve said before, marketing dollars are wasted if your content isn’t seen by potential clients. Not to mention, a disposable email address isn’t always as innocent as a user trying to protect their information.
It’s not difficult to imagine how a temporary, disposable email could be used for malicious activity. Temporary email addresses have been linked to all types of fraud. From attempting to infiltrate banking sites to mass spam accounts, temporary emails have been used at the detriment of companies and users alike. Sending an email to a malicious temporary email could open your site to an attack and land you on a blacklist.
Even non-malicious disposable emails can damage your sender score. Often, emails sent to a disposable email is never opened. This will drop your open and click rates, dropping your sender score. These emails are usually temporary, which means that after a certain period of time, if you don’t remove these emails, you’ll start receiving hard bounces, a crushing blow for your sender score.
For example, one of our customers had a large email list that they were sending their newsletter too. When they checked back in on their statistics for the success of that campaign, their cumulative stomach turned. Their deliverability had taken a nose dive. Their click rates were incredibly low. What had happened? How could they fix it?
After a short and mild panic attack, and a quick phone call to their Xverify account manager, they were able to figure it out. About a quarter of their list was disposable emails. Their numbers were so low because their emails weren’t being seen by engaged users. To remedy the situation, they sectioned these emails off to a separate list that their newsletter wasn’t being sent to. By the time their third newsletter went out, their numbers had increased significantly, and so had their sales.
A disposable email is actually very easy to obtain. Users have a plethora of options, from legitimate domain names to domains specifically used for disposable emails. Companies like Mailnator (@mailnator.com), Maildrop (@maildrop.com) and MailSac (@mailsac.com) have their own domain names. But other companies, like Airmail and Abine, use randomized domain names. All of these companies allow a user to enter in whatever email name they want, then match it with a domain to be entered into a subscription system.
Google and Yahoo! also offer disposable email options for their subscribers. Each server gives their user a simple way to create another email to help them sort their mail. For Gmail, a temporary email is created by adding a + to the username and then inserting whatever you want before the domain. So if a user’s email is regularly exampleuser@gmail.com, their temporary email could be exampleuser+1234@gmail.com. This sends the email to another folder separate from their main inbox.
Yahoo! allows their users to create up to 500 temporary email addresses. To create a temporary email with Yahoo! a user will insert their email address then a – followed by another word. So if an email was exampleuser@yahoo.com, the temporary email address could be exampleuser-1234@yahoo.com.
This might seem like an overwhelming feat, and without a service like Xverify it could be. But luckily, we can help. At Xverify we auto flag temporary and disposable email addresses to help you have this added layer of security. We have a dedicated team that scours the internet to find new domain names which host these accounts and get them immediately added to our suppression list.
With Xverify, by default we can mark these emails as invalid or you can continue to collect them and choose to segment them into a separate category. Blocking certain domains from entering you email list can help save you from ending up in an unread inbox and protect you from fraudulent email addresses.
For emails you aren’t sure about, like those from Yahoo!, Xverify can help you segment them into a separate list so you can closely watch their activity to decipher if they’re dangerous accounts or not. Ensuring you have a clean email list and staying up-to-date on potential threats are two keys to a successful email campaign, and Xverify helps keep you protected.
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