The case for and against disposable emails

As a user, do you sign up with disposable emails to try out a service? As a business, do you actively block disposable emails?

It’s a classic game of tug-of-war in the 21st century. Products block disposable email addresses, new disposable email domains pop up, and the cycle continues. (In my opinion the business are on the losing end).

The case for disposable email addresses

Let’s put on our user hats for a minute. We’re looking around online for a tool to automatically make GIFs from a Google Slideshow (or something like that, it sounds like a good idea at the time of writing).

Finding one that looks interesting, we sign up with our normal email.

Over the next two weeks we get pounded with marketing emails: did you know you can save 20% by signing up yesterday? Or tomorrow?

Clearly this is problem #1

As a user, I want to try out a service first. Get to know it a little bit. Then if I decide I want to start going steady with it, I’ll be interested in the marketing campaigns (and I usually am!).

Since every service ever does the same thing, people sign up with disposable email addresses. It shouldn’t be a surprise, and even if you say “well, I never sign up with those” you should at least be able to see why some people do.

Problem #2 is that I don’t know what you do with my information. I’m know your slogan is “Don’t be Evil”, but I don’t have time to read your TOS or Privacy Policy.

Here again: when I want to use the service long-term and connect my billing information, I’ll do my due diligence at this time. But why should I need to do that before I even know if your product does what I need it to do?

These are just a couple of reasons why, I think, people use disposable emails to try out a service. In my opinion they’re good ones!

The case against disposable email addresses

The loudest part of this group is obviously the businesses and product owners. I don’t think I actively hear developers/marketers complain about all the disposable signups they get, but the problem is nonetheless real:

Adding disposable emails to your mailing lists costs money.

Storing these emails costs money. Following-up and doing everything else the same as you do with normal, real email addresses all costs money. This is the issue from the product’s side.

And this perspective makes sense too right? We want you to use the service! But we also want to make sure we’re not throwing money down the drain or take attention away from users who need and want it.

So many, many products resort to blocking disposable email addresses in their signup and newsletter forms. As someone who has and still does run multiple startups from small to big, can you blame us? If disposable emails are costing $5 of my $20 MailChimp bill, then, well…

There’s other negative’s here too, as well. I will not count “not being able to send marketing emails” as a problem, though. In many cases, if you block the disposable email, that user is not going to sign up with you anyway — so you never had the opportunity to market to them in the first place.

And when you look at it this way, it makes sense to let people try your service with a disposable email address! Yet, the money problem and others like it keep us from letting it happen.

What if there was another way…

Before jumping in, I will preface this section by saying I am about to reference a new product I built. The underlying vision is the most important part — the product is one way to do it (it’s free, anyway).

Why can’t there be a way for me to to try out your service with a disposable email, and for you to not need to spend any resources or money on me? A cornucopia of goodness for everyone!

This why my brother and I built Identibyte. Identibyte can be integrated by product owners into a signup form, mailing listing, or anywhere else you accept an email. It will tell you if the email is disposable, or from a free provider, along with some other things.

But we don’t want you to block people from signing up! We want this:

I mean, you can if you want, it’s your product. But I envision a world with traits like these:

• As a user, I can evaluate your product without interruption.
• As a user, I can open communication by giving you my real email whenever I’m ready.
• As a product owner, I don’t need to spend money on disposable email addresses in my mailing lists.
• As a product owner, I can focus more of my resources on the users who want it — the ones who have opened communication with me.

Now that we can detect these emails, we have options! Here’s what I do on all of my services now:

Delete accounts with a disposable email after 10 days of inactivity.

Boom! That’s it. And it’s super easy with several advantages:

• Users who want to use a disposable email get to try out the service. Like I mentioned above, if we don’t allow this, they likely won’t sign up anyway.
• We don’t spend money adding disposable emails to our mailing list.
• Disposable accounts are recycled, so if someone comes along with the same disposable email 10 days later, they’ll be able to use it.

One other major point, specific to Identibyte, is that you can also detect “free email provider” addresses. With additional heuristics like this, we can create tags in our MailChimp account and send more personalized marketing campaigns.

Identibyte is only one way to do this. A lot of people build their own static lists, and there’s numerous resources out there for any way you want to do it!

At the end of the day, I would like to see more services adopting this ideology. I strongly believe that, in the end, you will convert users you otherwise wouldn’t have — and also these users will be some of the most dedicated because they got to try out things on their own terms and move forward at their own pace. Beyond that, products get to focus more on the users they do know and that do want the attention.

:: Cody Reichert

Thanks for reading — if you agree or disagree, like or dislike this article, you should clap anyway :D

Twitter for more: https://twitter.com/CodyReichert