Understanding and Blocking Disposable Email Addresses

Some are happy to have it, while for others it’s complete aggravation! Everyone has a different opinion towards disposable email addresses depending on who uses it and for what.

For a consumer, it is a way to fight back spam and bad opt-in protocols, for developers, it is a good tool to carry out multiple software tests before releasing it, but for the marketers, it is a threat to their sender reputation.

So in this blog, we will talk all about disposable/temporary emails, their pros & cons, and the best ways to manage or block them.

Disposable email, also known as temporary email or throwaway email, is a type of email that self-destructs after a certain period.

It allows registered users to receive emails at a temporary email address, which they can use without revealing their identity or personal/business email address. This is useful when people want to keep their actual email address private and avoid spam or unwanted emails.

Many services like TempMail, InternNXT, etc provide temporary email addresses that can be easily used to sign up.

1. Alias: These are alternate email addresses hosted by the user’s inbox provider, like Gmail or Yahoo, and are usually a variation of a genuine email address. The emails sent to alias are sent to your primary email address and will continue accepting the messages unless the user deletes it.

2. Forwarding Account: These are created on a different domain than the user’s account. It automatically forwards all incoming emails to another email address. It’s hard to get accurate results on such accounts as the open or click data.

3. Throwaway Emails: These are generated on the fly and are typically only valid for a short period, such as 24 hours or one week. They are the most dangerous for marketers as any email sent to them will bounce as soon as it expires.

All these emails are low-quality email addresses and are usually used for signups when the users don’t value your brand much and/or want to take advantage of free service multiple times without revealing their identity.

Sending emails to any of these temporary emails will result in a high email bounce rate eventually. Thus, marketers need to use a good disposable email checker and clean email lists thoroughly before shooting out email campaigns.

While users & spammers might find disposable email beneficial, it can be seriously harmful for businesses and marketers who rely on email for communication and marketing.

Failing to verify email addresses that are collected can lead to a large number of disposables in your email lists, reducing data quality and leading to serious damage.

Disposable email addresses are often used by spammers and other malicious actors. If you send an email to a disposable email address that is no longer active, the email will bounce.

This can damage your sender reputation and make it more difficult for your emails to be delivered to legitimate recipients.

Temporary email addresses are mostly created for one-time use after which it is either ignored or deleted by the owner. So now the email address does not exist anywhere but in your database which you plan to use for upcoming campaigns!

So your campaign will give a high bounce and low deliverability rate and the ESP in use will charge you for email addresses that do not exist anymore. That’s a two-way loss!

Reaching out to temporary email addresses or other risky email addresses could hurt your ability to send emails in the first place.

Multiple bounces, spam complaints, or unsubscribes can even force your ESP to suspend your account to meet the email protection standards.

As mentioned earlier, email service providers base their pricing plans on the total number of users across all lists, keeping a bloated list in the system can be a recurring waste. Disposables, duplicates, invalids, catch-alls, you are charged for all such bad email addresses too!

The return on investment goes down twice the rate as the prospect is not reachable so any future sales are not possible and in addition, you are being charged for the same.

To identify and block disposable email addresses, email verification is a must. Therefore, you need an email verifier tool that identifies disposable emails and lets you keep them out of your system.

Here are different ways to block disposable emails:

This is the easiest and most recommended way to identify and proactively stop disposable email users from signing up on your form/platform in real-time.

This method ensures that no unwanted emails slide into your email lists, saving you time and money spent on throwaway emails, and boosting the quality of your email lists.

Regular CRM and email list cleaning will also be helpful when you have a large lead database to deal with.

You can simply use a bulk email verifier and upload your email lists there to identify all the invalid, risky, and temporary emails and remove them from your email lists.

Clearout Email Verifier integrates with different CRMs and ESPs, allowing you to easily clean your email lists and manage/remove unwanted or temporary email addresses.

If you are using an email marketing service, you can usually add disposable email addresses to your blocklist. This will prevent your emails from being delivered to those addresses.

Also if you want to double secure your forms from disposable emails or any unwanted email domains from entering your system you can add them to your email verifier tool blocklists after they are identified.

For example, Clearout lets you strengthen your security measures against any kind of disposable or risky email addresses by giving you the blocklist feature to stop all the unwanted email domains you list from signing up on your forms. Hence, no email from a listed domain will be able to sign up on your platform.

Clearout offers a highly accurate email verification service both for bulk and real-time email verification. It runs multiple email checks to detect domains used by throwaway email providers such as 10minutemail, Maildrop, Throwaway Mail, and any other disposable email generator.

Using Clearout can drastically help you get rid of any temporary email address and boost your deliverability and engagement rate.

Apart from spammers, genuine users might also sometimes try to sign up with disposable email addresses if they are unsure about sharing their personal information on your website/form.

To avoid losing valuable leads and keep abusers away, you can also try:

People are apprehensive about sharing their most frequently used email addresses as they fear its misuse. This requires you to be honest, straight, and more vocal about the quality of security services.

Let the prospects be aware of your privacy and data security policies to build up trust in you and your services. Consistency, and sharing user-generated content are some other ways to evolve trust.

Incentives are a widely used way of attracting prospects but some users take advantage of the generosity and tend to misuse it by signing up with more than one email to fetch the maximum benefits.

Some websites allow users to keep the throwaway email for more than 10 minutes even if they have the opt-in form. The best way would be to give the new users a follow-up email within 30 minutes or even the next day.

Someone will rarely keep the tab unrefreshed for 24 hours. This way you’re encouraging people to sign up with their primary email addresses.

Ignoring the campaigns is very common when a user has got what it wants! Some people do not value the brand but value the fact “What’s in it for me?”

To build up user engagement and trust you need to answer the question. By letting them know what they had been missing on not signing up, the users will think twice before closing the tab or using a temporary email.

Now that we know everything about temporary emails and how they can harm us, make sure to keep a proactive approach towards cleaning them out of the system and saving your email campaigns for them.

By diligently implementing a reliable and highly accurate email verification service like Clearout to address not only the issue of temporary emails but all types of bad email addresses, you can safeguard your database and email campaigns from potential abuse, improve the quality of your user data, and enhance the overall effectiveness of your digital initiatives.