Invalid email address still receiving emails

[Anonymous]

For some reason, emails have been delivering to addresses that have been typed in incorrectly, such as: “something@gmail.com.com”.

They appear to be invalid email addresses more than us sending to spam traps. We tried looking through some community and support articles on techniques to identify invalid email addresses but didn’t find anything too useful. Can you point us to some ways to improve data quality of the email addresses themselves?

Thanks,

Laura

[David_Mason1]

Not in the example that you gave (something.gmail.com.com), but in other scenarios there is a catch-all mailbox. For example, if you send an email to iKnowThisEmailAddressDoesntExist@company.com, there are settings on the server to still deliver anything not assigned to a single mailbox. 

I'm sorry I don't have advice for your example. Hope this helps some.

[SanfordWhiteman]

@Laura K if you export a list of suspect addresses it'll be simple for a techsavvy person to see if the domains have MX records.  That would quickly have detected the @gmail.com.com error.  You could also build a webhook to do the same thing on the fly -- I'm sure there are some paid webhook services but I wouldn't bother with those myself.

[Josh_Hill13]

If you just want to fix malformed addresses, check your Invalid and Hard Bounced list and then fix those errors. You do not need a validation service to do this.

I do think StrikeIron is helpful if you have a high lead volume and have already automated other cleaning processes.

[SanfordWhiteman]

One more thing though -- <something@gmail.com.com> is not technically an invalid email.  It may be a nonexistent mailbox but there's nothing malformed about it: gmail.com.com is a valid domain and it has an MX record, so it could receive mail.  In fact as @David M suggests it's a prime candidate for just swallowing all mail sent to it, rather than bouncing, leaving mysteries in its wake.

So while a human can intuit that "example.com.com" was probably meant to be "example.com" (or was it meant to be "example.com.au"... hmm) a machine can't figure this out autonomously. However, as @Josh points out, if the machine tries to send to something@example.com.com and it Hard Bounces, that gives the feedback needed to at least look into it.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your help everyone! I will review these possible solutions with my team.


Laura