Five Types of Email Addresses You Might Want to Avoid

If you’re conducting an email marketing campaign, you’re obviously going to collect a large number of email addresses. In the process of creating the perfect email marketing campaign, you will need to make sure that everything is prepped to optimize your emails’ deliverability and you will have to find and eliminate fake email addresses.

While these steps will go long way in ensuring that you’re emails are all sent out and you don’t have bounces affecting your overall email metrics, the unfortunate truth is that just because an email address is not fake, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a good fit to have your email list.

Once you’ve used an email list cleaner on your mailing list, you will have gotten rid of all the invalid emails and be left with a collection of emails that are, on first glance, ready to receive your marketing materials.

But don’t rush.

There are still several types of email addresses that you need to avoid that you will need to filter out further so that your email campaign is as perfect as it can be. They are:

1. Catch-All Servers
2. Role Accounts
3. Free Emails
4. Spam Traps
5. Unengaged Recipients

In this post, let’s take a proper look at what each of the types of email is and why you might want to be avoiding them if you want to maximize your company’s success.

Five Types of Email Addresses You Might Want to Avoid

1) Catch-All Servers

Catch-All Servers, also known as Accept-All Servers, are set up so that every email sent to that server will be accepted. It doesn’t matter whether the particular mailbox exists or not, it will be accepted.

For example, if the Bounceless server was set up to be a catch-all server, it would accept emails sent “obviousfakeemail@bounceless.com” and “tonystark@bounceless.com” and “fakerthanfake@bounceless.com”. It doesn’t matter that these mailboxes don’t exist, the emails sent to them will be accepted nonetheless.

The problem with sending to catch-all servers is that they often don’t actually have a person behind them who is opening and reading through the emails it receives. So, any emails you sent here will not ultimately benefit your campaign or your brand.

If your list uses a double opt-in method – and it should – there is a chance that there might be someone on the other end. In which case, it’s okay to send your emails to that address.

Either way, take a moment to consider the situation before you take further action.

2) Role Accounts

Role accounts are simple. Nearly every businesses use them to handle general communications. These are emails assigned to a whole department or in some cases even the whole company. You’ve surely seen them before, addresses like: “info@information.com”, “sales@business.com” and “help@nohelp.com”.

While the understanding is that these emails help you directly contact the entire department, the reality is often that these accounts are managed by multiple people or a low-level employee who ultimately has no real decision-making power. Because of this, these email addresses will have ridiculously low open rates and higher than usual bouncebacks.

With these accounts, you’ll have to think a bit before you do anything. If the role account is your only way to contact either an existing client or a potential one, you would be better off not removing it from your list. Unless they have a high bounce rate, of course. Bouncebacks are never good.

While a role account email address that has been validated will not bounce, having too many role accounts will often be a problem for your campaign, overall. You will need to look through and delete role accounts that you don’t need so that your marketing campaign is not affected in the long term.

3) Free Email Providers

Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail are all free email providers, so when we tell you that you need to be careful with these, you might be a bit taken aback.

Free email addresses are incredibly popular and chances are, you will get a lot of good, reliable leads and connect with potential customers by including them on your mailing list. However, depending on your business, there is something to be said about avoiding these when you are mailing your marketing materials.

The thing is, free email accounts are incredibly easy to get and so. This means that your email list could potentially fill with spammers, trolls, non-business leads or unused secondary emails. All of these will ultimately be a pain on your neck as you conduct your campaign, so avoiding them, to begin with, might be a good idea. And business people often have an actual, primary business email account, anyway. So, it’s not like you’re losing potential clients.

However, if you’re a small business or want to have a vast mailing list that takes into account people who might not have a business account, by all means, keep the free email addresses on your mailing list.

4) Spam Traps

Spam Traps are the riskiest of all the different emails in this list.

Spam traps, also known as honeypots, are set up to lure spammers. These are real mailboxes set up on valid, active servers so that they will pass any initial inspection. They are also designed to avoid detection, so if one somehow manages to get onto your mailing list, you will not know something is wrong until your overall campaign starts to take a hit.

Without an email verification service, you will have a terrible time. There is no other way to find spam traps, in fact. These email addresses will stay snugly in their place on your list, and since they don’t return bounces, you will not know something is wrong. So, you’ll keep sending your emails and your brand’s IP reputation will keep diving down.

To avoid spam traps, ensure that you are cleaning your list regularly.

5) Unengaged Recipients

Making sure that you don’t have unengaged recipients is key to the success of any email marketing campaign.

The problem with unengaged recipients is that while email verification might give them a pass, ISPs prefer senders who have high engagement rates with the email addresses that receive the emails. Customers or subscribers who don’t engage with your emails – opening them, reading them, clicking on links and so on – will hurt your campaign’s future deliverability.

The sad truth is that your subscribers will stop engaging. It could be for any reason. They could no longer be interested in your business, they might not like your marketing materials, they could have changed emails or maybe they just don’t want to be bothered anymore. Whatever their reason is, while you can try to send them a few more emails to try and entice them into re-engaging, ultimately, if they lack engagement continues… You will need to remove them from your list.

Getting rid of these email address could ultimately end up being the fact that saves your marketing campaign from landing directly in the spam folder of every mailbox you send it to.

So, take the necessary action.

The Lesson to Learn

Email marketing campaigns have been a thing for a long while now, but honestly, there are so many factors that contribute to it and you can’t necessarily predict the outcomes correctly.

It isn’t an exact science. You can do the best and know that you will have good results, but there are still many mistakes you can make without even knowing.

You need to keep your data clean, stay on top of your campaign’s metrics and make sure you are adapting your marketing strategy as the situation needs. This will start you on the journey to increasing the success of your brand.

There are many things that can affect your email deliverability. You need to make sure that your email list cleaner knows what they’re doing so that you are getting the best service for your price and the best return on your investment. Bounceless does. Feel free to contact us.