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What are disposable emails & how to deal with them?

What is a Disposable Email Address?

A disposable email address is an address a user creates for temporary needs and discards when it’s no longer required.
Three types of disposable email addresses exist:

A throwaway account – an address created for a one-time use. It doesn’t forward emails and becomes inactive after a certain period of time.
A forwarding account – an address created with the purpose of forwarding mail to the user’s main inbox instantly.
An alias address –the email sent to the alias address will still end up in the recipient’s mailbox. However, the user can set up filters in order to send messages that come to this address to specific folders.

Whatever type of disposable email address is used, your company suffers. Disposable email address services are free to use. It’s fairly easy for a consumer to set up a temporary address, use it to get a freebie or a subscription, and throw it away shortly.

Gmail and Yahoo! Mail offer the alias address option to all their clients since there isn’t anything illegal about the action. In fact, it improves user experience, making recipients happy with the email service provider.

What are disposable emails used for?

Top reasons why users want to create a disposable email address include:

They are afraid the company that gets their address will share it with others.
They don’t want to get email messages from the company they share the address with.
They want to receive a freebie (e-book, whitepaper, checklist, etc.) but can only do it in exchange for contact details.

Whatever the reason for creating a disposable email address is, putting them on your email list can be damaging for your company.

When you consider the user’s point of view, it’s easy to understand how disposable email addresses can be tempting. They free the person from the need to share their real address with a company or a service while still getting the benefits of signing up.

Many users worry about companies transferring their email addresses to other businesses. This can happen in two ways:

A company deliberately sells its email list.
A company is hacked, and the list falls into the wrong hands

Either way, unless the user takes advantage of a disposable email address, they suffer the consequences.

Why Are Disposable Emails Bad For Your Business?

Putting a disposable address on your list can be bad for your business. Here are a few ways your marketing efforts and reputation could suffer.

Low open rate – emails you send to a disposable account remain unopened. This hurts your open rate. With time, if you keep sending emails to invalid accounts, your sender’s reputation will start to suffer.
Lost leads – when a person shares a disposable email address to sign up for your services or in exchange for a lead magnet, you don’t get the data you are looking for. Besides losing leads, you hurt your entire marketing campaign. The effort you make to create personalized offers to these clients is useless.
Incorrect information – people can use disposable email addresses to register, leave bad comments, write fake reviews, and take advantage of services that are reserved for potential clients.

While somewhat beneficial for a private user, disposable email addresses are bad for companies. They hurt your marketing campaign, give you the wrong information about leads, and hinder your sender’s reputation.

Overall, having a disposable email address on your email list is worse than not having one at all.

How to Identify Disposable Email Addresses?

Identifying disposable email addresses can be complicated. Some companies try to block disposable email addresses that come from established disposable email address providers.

However, doing so is becoming tougher and tougher. The number of such service providers is growing exponentially. Keeping track of them manually is impossible.

Another way to identify temporary email addresses is to check the delivery status of your emails daily. While this can be an efficient method, it’s rather time-consuming and taxing. Unless you have a large marketing department, such a tedious manual task can keep your team from fulfilling other functions.

The simplest way to identify and remove disposable email addresses is by running an email validator.

An email validator checks all addresses on your email list and notifies you about their accuracy and quality. By taking advantage of the validator on a regular basis, you can spot and discard disposable email addresses before they start hurting your business.

How You Can Avoid Disposable Emails?

While it may be impossible to avoid disposable emails altogether, you can minimize their number on your mailing list by:

Using email address verification API – our service works in real-time, blacklisting both old and new suspicious email domains. The validator keeps up with the new disposable email providers, adding them to the internal blacklist and checking new addresses against it.
Monitor your customers – instead of sending messages to all addresses on your email list automatically, consider checking back with both potential and existing customers regularly. By asking them to confirm registration and interest in your products or services every once in a while, you can find out whether the email addresses are still valid.
Avoid buying email lists – even if you believe that an email list comes from a respectable company, avoid buying it. The list can contain spam traps and disposable email addresses. Each email address you put on your list should be checked individually.

Keeping your email list clean allows you to avoid blacklists, maintain a stellar sending reputation, and supercharge your email marketing efforts.