Spam and phishing may be age-old threats but as many of today’s cyber attacks, which typically get into target networks with their help, show, they still work. Aided by convincing social engineering baits, malicious emails still manage to get recipients to either click a link pointing to a malware- or exploit-laden page or download a malicious program.
Companies can, however, lessen their employees’ chances of getting tricked by spam and phishing emails with the help of email verification in python and other programming languages.
Email verification can help site owners catch typos that users make when they enter their email addresses on registration pages. It also lets marketers and salespeople touch base easily with customers to send alerts when their credit cards expire, receipts for purchases made, or offers they may be interested in.
For those wary of fake signups, email verification helps with validating a registrant’s identity. It can prevent users from signing up for free trials or offers with disposable email addresses, reducing companies’ chances of suffering from freemium abuse or ending up with customers who aren’t likely to convert no matter what.
Catch Typos
Spammers and phishers are known for imitating famous brands when sending emails to targets. Examples obtained from Abuse.ch’s ThreatFox include “fcalebook” for “facebook” and “micros0ftcenter” for “microsoft.”
A website signup page that uses email verification can be configured to prevent users with potentially fake email domains mimicking those of well-known companies like Facebook and Microsoft in the examples above from registering. Threat databases like those maintained by PhishTank, Spamhaus, Abuse.ch, and VirusTotal can be good sources of misspelled variants of organization names that figured in malicious campaigns.
Each time a user signs up on your website with an email address containing typos like “username@fcalebook[.]com” or “username@micros0ftcenter[.]com,” email verification tools may prevent the registration from pushing through.
Make Sure a Customer’s Email Address is Legitimate
It’s quite common these days for users to give out email addresses they don’t normally use for official communications when signing up on sites they frequently visit but don’t really want to receive tons of messages from. That’s why most companies require registrants to sign up with their corporate email addresses.
An email verification tool can validate the existence of any email address with several tests that include formatting, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Domain Name System (DNS), and disposable domain checks. You can configure signup pages to only accept email addresses that pass all four tests before accepting a registration.
That should help you avoid including unreachable email addresses in your customer database, which could lead to high bounce rates that could be indicative of spamming activity. Note that a high bounce rate could lower your search engine optimization (SEO) ranking or, worse, land you on a spam blocklist.
Avoid Fake Signups
Apart from using backup email addresses to avoid spam, many users also employ disposable or temporary email addresses when signing up for free trials. While not all of them may have malicious intentions but only want to protect their privacy, some may actually be freemium abusers.
Email verification can prevent people from signing up for free trials using disposable email addresses. It can catch email addresses from providers like Guerilla Mail, Maildrop, and Mailinator.
So when a user registers for a free trial using an email address, such as username@guerillamail[.]com, username@maildrop[.]cc, or username@mailinator[.]com, the email verification tool would alert site owners that these are temporary email domains that can be found on lists like https://emailverification.whoisxmlapi.com/disposable-email-domains and should not be allowed to sign up.
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Email verification tools can be configured in different ways, depending on how strict you want your criteria for registration to be. And the benefits discussed in this post are just three of many other ways they can be useful for any company that relies on email marketing and who wish to avoid the dangers that threats like spamming and phishing bring.