How to Detect Fake Email Addresses in Your Contact List
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Last updated
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In modern times, email marketing has remained one of the most effective tools businesses and individuals use to reach their audiences. However, quality in this regard is essential to keep your reputation and deliverability rates high. The case of prevalence in fake or bogus email addresses in your contact list would adversely affect the sender score because the sender score directly impacts how many of your emails will make their way to the inbox rather than the spam folder. Fortunately, that risk can be minimized quite easily by making use of a LetsExtract Email Verifier which will filter the bad addresses. That, however, is only one step in the process. The following article discusses tips on how to identify fake email addresses for protection of sender score and improvement in email marketing.
Your sender score, in simple terms, is the reputation of your IP address. Basically, it's the rate at which ESPs decide whether your emails should end up in someone's inbox or spam box. Having a high hard bounce rate—the result of sending emails to fake or unverified addresses—lowers your sender score. When that happens, fewer of your valid emails will end up in the recipients' inboxes, which hurts your email marketing strategy.
Higher bounce rates: As the fake email addresses don't exist, your messages will bounce.
More chances of blacklisting: Sending consistently to invalid emails can have the ESPs blacklist your domain.
Decreased deliverability: The lower the sender score, the fewer emails will make it to your audience.
Reduced customer engagement: Fewer emails are reaching the context, meaning your marketing is less effective.
Therefore, it is very important to keep your email list clean and accurate. Now let's get into some actionable ways how you can detect fake emails addressed to you.
Before you can clean your contact list, you need to understand how to identify those fake email addresses. Following are some surefire signs the address might be bogus:
Unusual Domain Names: Most valid email addresses contain common domain names like Gmail, Yahoo, or a company's domain. If you get an email with a weird or suspicious domain name, for example, @fakesite.com or @123mail.biz, it could well be a fake.
Random Character Strings: These are often bot- or spam-generated email addresses, especially those with a combination of random letters, numbers, or symbols such as abc123@xyz.com. In most cases, real people do not use this type of email address.
Disposable or Temporary Domains: Services like TempMail or GuerrillaMail provide temporary email addresses that expire within a very short period of time. Addresses using such domains are most probably fakes and should be marked for removal.
Typo Squatting Domains: Sometimes, spurious email addresses will spoof popular domains through common misspellings or slight variations—maybe something like @gmaail.com instead of @gmail.com. These domains can be malignant since they usually point to phishing scams.
Multiple Addresses from One Source: For example, if you noticed your list had several addresses that were registered in bulk from the same source at nearly the same time, then this might uncover a portion of fake sign-ups.
While the above signs can help you find such fake emails manually, it is way more effective to use automated tools and processes. Following are some of the tried and tested techniques for finding invalid or fake email addresses in your contact list:
Use an Email Verification Tool: One of the effective ways to trace fake email addresses is by using a free email verifier. These tools, in a different form or methodology, do the same thing: conducting automatic checks through various sets of tests—syntax checks, verification of domains, and response of mail servers—on a given email address. Free email verifiers can quickly detect whether an address is fake, misspelled, or undeliverable.
Confirmation on Double Opt-In: When someone subscribes to your mailing list, you immediately send them an email and ask them to confirm that by clicking on a link that came into their inbox. In this way, you may be certain that the email address given is real and accessible. If the person never confirms this by clicking on the confirmation link, then it is probably a dummy subscription.
Regular Cleaning of Lists: Regular cleaning of your email list will help you maintain a good sender score. Remove hard bounces, inactive subscribers, or other invalid emails to clean up your list periodically using an email validation tool.
Check for Role-Based Addresses: These would typically include addresses based on roles, such as info@domain.com or support@domain.com, which companies use but individual subscribers hardly ever use. Sometimes these may cause deliverability issues and may not add much value to your email engagement.
Improve Bounce Rates: High bounce rates are a direct pointer that your list is full of phony or invalid email addresses. If you happen to notice that after a certain campaign is rolled out, the number of bounced emails is much higher than usual, investigate and remove the email addresses causing delivery failure.
Hunter io
Domain search, bulk email verification
50 verifications per month
NeverBounce
Real-time verification, API integration
1,000 credits upon signup
ZeroBounce
AI-powered email scoring, API and SMTP testing
100 verifications per month
MailTester
Simple verification, no sign-up required
Unlimited single verifications
VerifyEmailAddress
Syntax and MX record checks
Free for individual verifications
Even a few fake email addresses on your list can have serious consequences for your campaigns. Here's how they can affect your overall email marketing efforts.
Increased bounce rate: Emails sent to nonexistent addresses will be rejected, inflating your bounce rate and sending ESPs the signal that you are not maintaining your list.
Reputation Damage: High bounce rates, spam complaints, and blacklisting after emailing phantom addresses will hurt your reputation with ESPs and lower the chances of your legitimate emails making it to the inbox.
Higher Costs: The reason being, most email marketing platforms charge you based on the size of your list. By keeping those fake or cold addresses in your database, you inflate its scale and pay more for it without any return on investment.
You'll be able to protect your email marketing from being undermined by false addresses if you follow the best practices outlined in this article.
Following are some best practices to consider in keeping your email lists clean and your sender score high:
Email Verification Tools: Run your list through an email verification service from time to time to get rid of invalid addresses.
Encourage Double Opt-in: Double opt-in provides assurance that people signing up are interest-driven and give valid email addresses.
Reactivate Inactive Subscribers: Regularly send re-engagement campaigns to your inactive subscribers. If they don't respond, understand that it is time to remove them from your list.
Regular List Pruning: This is a system of checks and balances, whereby you systematically remove unresponsive or inactive emails from your list at least every few months to maintain the quality of the list.
Fake emails are invalid or randomly generated emails that do not belong to real people. Emails sent to them increase bounces, lower your sender score, and hurt your email reputation.
A Free Email Verifier will check the validity of email addresses on your list by testing syntax, domain, and mail server for assurance of quick removal of fake, misspelled, or undeliverable addresses.
Bounce rate is defined as the number of emails coming back as undeliverable. A high bounce rate is going to lower your sender score, which would reduce the chances of actually hitting inboxes.
It is highly recommended to clean your emailing list regularly, such as every three to six months, depending on how actively you build your list. This regular cleaning of invalid or unresponsive emails helps to ensure a healthy sender score.
Fake email addresses often contain random characters, disposable domains, unusual domain names, or multiple addresses issued within a short period. Use an email verifier to verify their authenticity.
By proactively maintaining your contact list and using the reviewed tools and techniques in this article, you will significantly cut down the chances of fake email addresses harming your sender score. A clean email list doesn't just guarantee good deliverability but ensures your campaigns go to the right audiences.
