The purpose of temporary / disposable email is to keep the user anonymous. This way, they can access free services, download materials, etc. without having to create a relationship with the source of the content.

For those working in email marketing, the temporary email represents a fake email and also a major problem.

This is because professionals aim to generate leads through healthy mailing lists, and a disposable email is a contact that does not generate leads; on the contrary.

This type of email is designed to expire in a short space of time. Often just a few minutes. And this culminates in the creation of list bounces.

Just to give you an example, Temp Mail, one of the largest temporary email platforms in the world, registers around 7 million hits per month.

But why is temporary email so damaging to marketing campaigns?

Let’s start by understanding what bounces are and how disposable emails can generate them.

What are bounces

Bounces are emails that fail to be delivered to the recipient. The reasons for this can be temporary or permanent.

Temporary reasons that prevent an email from reaching the recipient (also known as soft bounces) can be a full inbox; a server that was unavailable at the time of delivery; emails with heavy images (over 500 kb), blocks, etc.

Once the problem has been solved (the mailbox has been freed up, for example, or the instability of the email provider has passed), the email is able to reach the inbox. This is why they are called temporary delivery failures.

On the other hand, the permanent reasons that prevent an email from being delivered are much more serious, as they are irreversible problems that invalidate the email. They are therefore known as hard bounces, or permanent delivery failures.

Examples of hard bounces are invalid, non-existent or deactivated emails. There are email marketing platforms that can consider emails with consecutive blocks as hard bounces. But they are not invalid emails! Always be on the lookout.

It’s important to remember that lists containing 3% bounces are blocked by ISPs, regardless of whether the list contains 1,000 or 100,000 emails.

As a result, investments in email marketing are wasted and senders’ reputations are seriously damaged.

Why disposable/temporary emails generate bounces

Disposable/temporary emails expire, becoming non-existent after a predetermined period, which can be 10 minutes, an hour or a day.

So an email marketing list can’t deliver messages to emails that don’t exist, right?

Each disposable email represents a hard bounce. The serious one we’ve just seen.

Disposable/temporary email: damage beyond bounces

With a list full of temporary (and therefore low-quality) emails, financial resources are wasted, including the time of the professionals involved.

In other words, it means that the professionals will commit to efforts that will never generate results, since non-existent emails (or hard bounces caused by disposable emails) do not receive communications.

As a result, the delivery rate plummets, as do subsequent metrics such as click-through rates and conversions. In other words, with throwaway emails on lists, the entire ROI of the campaign suffers.

Temporary email and corporate email

Corporate emails are great candidates for becoming disposable emails. This is because companies tend to have a high turnover of employees.

When the owner of an email is promoted, their address may change, highlighting their new position.

The same can happen with employees who are transferred from one sector to another, or from one location to another.

The same goes for dismissals, where the email address also ceases to exist. Therefore, anyone who has a list of corporate contacts should be even more aware of the generation of bounces on lists.

How to get rid of disposable/temp email

For email marketing to generate the expected results, you need an email verification service.

Through this service, discarded/temporary emails can be avoided in two different ways:

Real-time verification API: one of the main objectives of email marketing is to generate leads. And for this to happen, you need to build a list of active emails with a real interest in receiving your communications, using registration forms.

However, one of the biggest problems with forms is typing errors and disposable addresses, which make the emails invalid.

By integrating the API with the data collection service, temporary emails or those with typing errors are identified and prevented from joining the lists.

In other words, users can only proceed with their intention to download or access material if they enter a valid email address.

If you enter a disposable email (or any other type of invalid email), the tool suggests “did you mean”, helping to validate the email.

Bulk email verification: this applies to disposable/temporary emails that are already on lists and have become bounces. The service removes invalid emails as well as bounces, sanitizing the lead register. This way, professionals have real contacts in their hands, with whom they will be able to communicate.

Conclusion

Disposable or temporary emails are very damaging to email marketing campaigns, as they become bounces very quickly.

It is very important for companies that use email as a communication channel to keep an eye on their lists and check them frequently.

In this way, they avoid wasting their investment in email marketing and the time of their sales teams.

Verified lists work to prevent and eliminate temporary emails, and are fundamental to guaranteeing good results, both in terms of lead generation and sales optimization.

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