Invalid Email Addresses

Overview

What is an invalid email address?

Invalid email addresses are addresses that cannot or should not receive emails. For example, invalid emails that cannot receive emails include:

  • Incorrect formatting, like typos and syntax errors
  • The email address doesn’t exist
  • The mailbox is full and therefore cannot receive incoming mail
  • The mailbox is blocked by its service provider

There are also some invalid or risky types of email addresses that can receive incoming emails but you shouldn’t send to or should send with caution. 

  • Catch-all emails accept mail but may not be a real email address belonging to a person
  • Role-based emails are valid but may belong to a group or department
  • Disposable email addresses are temporary emails that people use to avoid receiving spam or marketing emails to their personal inbox—you shouldn’t send to these.

Note: Invalid emails are different from inactive emails. Inactive emails are valid email addresses belonging to subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails for a significant amount of time. It’s a good idea to segment these subscribers, try to win them back and exclude them from future email campaigns.

Are invalid emails dangerous?

If you send emails to invalid addresses you’ll get a hard bounce. The higher your hard bounce rate (anything over 2% is considered problematic) the higher the chance that your sender reputation will be negatively affected. In turn, this will impact your email deliverability meaning more of your messages will head to the spam folder. 

You could even find yourself on an IP blocklist, some of which are extremely tricky to get removed from. This is because when you have a high bounce rate, spam filters and ISPs mark you as a risky sender—either because you’re sending spam or not following best practices by keeping your email list clean or abiding by spam/privacy laws such as GDPR.

As well as being bad for your deliverability, invalid emails also:

  • Are a waste of money. If you’re sending to email addresses that will never receive or open your messages, it will still cost you. Keeping invalid email addresses on your email list means you’ll pay more to Email Service Providers (ESPs) for subscribers that don’t exist. 
  • Will negatively impact your ROI. The more you spend on emails that don’t convert, the lower your Return on Investment.
  • Skew your email campaign metrics. Without knowing how many emails in your list are invalid, your metrics won’t be reliable. The cleaner your list, the better the data, meaning you’ll have a clearer picture about your email marketing campaign performance and be able to make informed decisions about your strategy.

How do invalid email addresses end up on your list?

There are a few ways that invalid emails can make their way to your email list, some of which are completely avoidable. Others are sometimes out of your control, that's why Encharge offers automatic email validation so you don't have to do it manually all the time.

1. Using a purchased email list 

This is the number one way to contaminate your email list with bad email addresses. Subscribers that are unlucky enough to end up on a purchased list have not consented to be subscribed to your emails. What’s more, these lists are full of spam traps, fake emails and inactive mailboxes. 

As tempting as it may be, purchasing an email list should be avoided at all costs.

2. Disposable emails

Many people use disposable emails to sign up to services or receive freebies so they can keep their inbox free of marketing emails and spam. These are risky because while they might be delivered at first, they have no engagement and often become inactive after a period of time.

3. Human error

We all know the saying that to err is human. The same can be said when it comes to your email list. Typos and errors when entering an email are out of your control, so some are bound to slip through the cracks. Luckily, there is a way to prevent such email addresses from making it to your list, and we’ll talk about this later.

4. Outdated subscriber details

It’s normal that with time, your email list will decrease in quality. People change their contact details all the time, whether they’ve lost access to their account, left the company to which the email address belonged to, or simply outgrew their teenage email address. Oftentimes, subscribers forget to update their details meaning you’re left with the inactive email address. 

5. Full mailbox

A lot of people don’t keep their personal inbox very organized. As the emails pile up and the mailbox reaches capacity, it’s likely to reach a point where it will stop accepting new messages. This causes incoming emails to bounce. 

6. Dreaded spam traps

Even if you’ve built your email list by the book, you’re not completely immune to spam traps. ISPs often use inactive email addresses as spam traps to catch out spammers and senders who are lazy about keeping their email list clean. Additionally, there’s always the chance that someone signs up to your list with a spam trap on purpose to cause harm to your email list. 

How to deal with invalid email addresses?

Email address validation happens automatically when a subscriber is added to your Encharge account. 

You can quickly check Invalid email addresses by creating a segment with the Email Validation Result field set to Invalid.

Once you have the Invalid Emails segment you can use it to create a small flow to automatically remove such emails.

By having such flow, you make sure you don't send emails to invalid addresses by mistake. It's a neat way to automatically clean your list from potentially harmful emails.

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