scraped emails are not necessarily invalid addresses. Even so, they require close attention.
EMAIL CONCEPTS – At first, this term may sound unusual, and you may never have heard of it. Even so, these emails may be hurting your email marketing results right now. They are scraped emails.
In this article, you will learn:
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What is a scraped email?
The term comes from the English verbto scrape. It refers to a spammer technique for building email lists based on the most common names used in corporate-domain email addresses.
It works like this: corporate domains often use addresses such as sales@, billing@, finance@, and many others. Those are only a few examples. Around the world, hundreds of other common corporate email names exist, including system@, webmaster@, and similar addresses.
Assuming these addresses exist, the spammer begins a technique known as adictionary attack, mapping valid domains and trying different combinations until a large send list is created. Every message delivered without an error (bounce) becomes a gain for the spammer.
For example, suppose the domain @fictional.example is valid. Using only the address names mentioned in this article would already provide seven email addresses to try. Multiply that by thousands of domains, and a scraped list is formed.
How can it hurt your results?
“But I’m not a spammer,” you may be thinking. This is exactly where the topic becomes relevant to your day-to-day work.
Because this practice exists, providers monitor these addresses more closely, as they tend to receive large amounts of spam.
Addresses such as sales@ are not personal. One employee may use an address today and another may use it tomorrow without the address changing. An address such as diego@yourcompany is personal: you can identify Diego and understand his role. It may therefore offer a real opportunity for conversion. With finance@yourcompany, however, you only know that the address is used by someone responsible for the finance department.
When there is turnover in that position, the former user who gave opt-in for your messages is replaced by someone who may not know why your emails are arriving. That person may report you as a spammer by clicking the provider’s “this is spam” button or by filing a formal complaint with an international blacklist .
There is another issue with these addresses: they may not belong to just one person. They can beredirectsthat forward messages to several people in the company, creating an even greater risk of complaints (spam reports).
Another important point is that these inboxes receive high volumes of messages, including spam, so their engagement rates are likely to be very low. This hurts your reports and results, may obscure your engagement analysis, and can lead you to draw the wrong conclusions about your deliverability strategy.
The SafetyMails platform is ideal for checking and validating email addresses of this kind. This does not mean you can never send messages to them. It simply means that, depending on your strategy, you should remain cautious and decide whether reaching these addresses is genuinely important.
