How can I validate email signups from unusual or new domains to avoid spam traps?
Summary
What email marketers say12Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Mailjet advises gradually increasing sending volume from new domains or IPs (email warm-up) to establish a positive sender reputation with ISPs and prevent deliverability issues.
Email marketer from Email Hippo shares that their service includes typo detection, suggesting alternatives to misspelled domains during signup. This helps prevent users from accidentally entering incorrect email addresses that may lead to spam traps.
Email marketer from ZeroBounce explains that their AI-powered email scoring system assesses the risk level of each email address, helping to identify potential spam traps and high-risk addresses before sending campaigns.
Email marketer from NeverBounce shares that their real-time email verification can identify invalid or risky email addresses at the point of signup. This includes detecting disposable emails, syntax errors, and domain issues.
Email marketer from Litmus suggests to monitor your sender reputation regularly, including domain and IP reputation, to identify and address potential deliverability issues before they impact your campaigns. Also consider the from name and subject line.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares that AWeber has built in typo auto detection for domain issues and corrects many of these at sign up time with an 'are you sure?' type interstitial.
Email marketer from EmailOnAcid explains the importance of list segmentation to target subscribers based on demographics, behavior, engagement, and more. Segmenting your lists helps ensure that your messages are relevant to each subscriber, increasing engagement and helping avoid being marked as spam.
Marketer from Email Geeks suggests a build-your-own-reputation system where if you haven't seen the domain before, you do more checks.
Email marketer from Quora Forums suggests to check if your IP address or domain is on any blacklists, this is a crucial step in identifying and resolving deliverability issues caused by poor sender reputation.
Marketer from Email Geeks explains that COI has significant value to a wide spectrum of delivery issues.
Email marketer from Validity recommends employing a combination of list hygiene techniques, including email verification and suppression lists, to identify and remove potentially harmful email addresses from your database.
Email marketer from Reddit explains that implementing double opt-in (DOI) ensures that only valid and engaged users are added to your list. This helps prevent spam traps and improves overall deliverability.
What the experts say4Expert opinions
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that using honey pots (email addresses specifically created to catch spammers) on signup forms can help identify and block bots and malicious users, reducing the risk of adding spam traps to your list.
Expert from Email Geeks explains that most verification tools are smart enough to denote a catch all domain and warn you about it, so then you can decide if you want to special case it.
Expert from Spam Resource recommends using email validation services to clean up email lists and reduce the risk of sending to spam traps, especially when dealing with unusual or new domains.
Expert from Email Geeks shares idea to design a system where signups from domains not in the top X domains go through a double opt-in/confirmed opt-in to help knock out garbage traps while avoiding undue burden of COI/DOI for all signups.
What the documentation says5Technical articles
Documentation from Hunter.io shares that their email verification tool checks whether an email address exists without sending an actual email. It identifies invalid, disposable, or risky email addresses, improving deliverability rates.
Documentation from AWS explains that Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) provides tools to verify email addresses before sending. This includes identifying hard bounces and spam complaints to maintain a clean sending reputation.
Documentation from SendGrid details the use of suppression lists to automatically exclude unsubscribed, bounced, and spam-reported email addresses from future campaigns. This helps protect sender reputation and improve deliverability.
Documentation from Kickbox details that their service identifies catch-all domains. They suggest treating these with caution, as deliverability to these addresses is often unreliable. Consider implementing additional verification steps.
Documentation from Mailgun explains that their Email Validation API helps identify and correct typos, detect disposable email addresses, and flag potential spam traps before they enter your system. It returns a quality score, deliverability risk, and suggestions.