What is a disposable email address (DEA)?

Email lists play a central role in any online marketing strategy. Whether for your blog, business, or organization, chances are you rely on email marketing. Developing a list of loyal followers can help you not just increase your revenue, but also keep up to date with your audience so you can offer more value. But when you ask website visitors to sign up for your newsletter, not everyone jumps at the opportunity to give out their email address... that's why you need to validate your email list. In fact, an increasing number of web users turn to disposable email addresses (DEAs) to avoid releasing their primary email address.

What is a DEA?

A DEA or disposable email address is a temporary, throw-away address that expires after a short period of time. DEA provider websites offer a service where users can generate a temporary email address (with about a 10 minute lifespan, for example). Some of the most common DEA providers are 10 Minute Mail, Guerrilla Mail and Fake Inbox.

If your site prompts users to register before accessing specific content (such as a member area or an e-book), you probably attract a number of DEAs on your list as users try to sidestep the process. Since the address is real and DEAs deliver incoming messages, users can even click the link in your verification email to confirm that the address is valid. Then a few minutes later the email address self-destructs.

How do DEAs impact your email marketing?

For starters, your marketing efforts become less effective. DEAs make your list look inflated, and the content you create fails to reach potential customers.

Depending on how many DEAs you have on your list, you could rack up a high bounce rate, damaging your sender score. And unfortunately, since these email addresses appear valid at first, they slip under your radar. Don’t try to predict when they expire – even the seemingly straight-forward ’10 Minute Mail’ service enables the user to add more time to the session, prolonging the DEA’s lifespan. So while you may not get a bounce on the first or second email, problems will crop up later on.

Having DEAs on your list reflects poor quality and value. You already know that sender scores exist to protect internet users from spam. A quality list leads to a high sender score. Let your score represent the value you know you can offer.

How can you remove DEAs from your list?

Now you can see why a clean list is so important, and fortunately, at Verifalia, we offer a comprehensive, convenient solution. We scrub your email list, filtering out any DEAs. Some validation services assume you to know which DEA providers to look out for and expect you to manually blacklist their names. But Verifalia’s team of experts conducts the research for you. We access our database of over 7,300 DEA providers to detect and filter throw-away email addresses.

With Verifalia, all you need to do is upload your list and we take care of the rest. Without sending any test emails or disturbing your valued customers, we simply filter invalid addresses, ensuring that your marketing content makes it into the right inbox.

Sign up now and start cleaning your email list!

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