There are few things that annoy me as much as the following scenario:
- Someone sends a message to me via a feedback form.
- I compose and send a reply.
- My message (the reply) bounces back because they mis-typed their email address.
Sometimes I can look at the address and figure out what the issue was (.cm → .com, etc.), but most often I am left with no way to respond.
This frustrates me on several levels. Whoever submitted the form is now under the impression that I did not bother to respond, when in fact I did. Also, I spent valuable time composing the response, which was time completely wasted.
I’ve thought about a couple of ways to address this, but none really feels like a solution:
- Use mailto: links instead of contact forms. Rejected because we want to request people give us more information in what they send in. Also because mailto: links don’t work with webmail unless you’ve jumped through hoops.
- Challenge-response. Save the message in a queue and send a confirmation email to the sender that has a link in it. They have to click the link to have the message sent. Rejected because it’s annoying and there is no good way for people to get back to their message if they did typo their email address.
- A little inline pop-up confirmation that shows their name and email and says “this is how we should contact you, right?” when they hit send. I haven’t rejected this completely yet, but it does feel like an annoyance.
Does anyone have a silver bullet for this situation that I’ve overlooked?
One thing I’ve done in the past is to immediately confirm receipt of the email via an email, and note in the submission response that you should see that real soon, otherwise you may not see a reply. Does that help? Dunno.
Once upon a time you could finger an email address, but that’s dead now.
Hm. The only thing I can think of is an autoresponse that checks for bounces before a final submittal to you. You should be able to quickly query a server and get a response; anything not in the 500 series should indicate that the email address is good.
Many websites require you to enter your email address twice to verify you’ve entered it correctly when registering for an account. Perhaps that can be your fix? Simply have people enter their email address twice for verification.
Geof–
We have an auto-reply, perhaps I should adjust the address to look for bounces. I don’t want to slow down the processing by doing a handshake for a few technical reasons.
Drew–
I always copy-paste in those situations and it always annoys me that I have to do so. I don’t see that as a solution.
Why not just have folks confirm their email by typing in again in a second form and make sure those forms match – and also make sure the first form is non-copyable.
Make it CC the email to the sender, and if they don’t get it or you get the bounce you can abandon the email all together!
Dave–
I *hate* those with a passion. Though I guess it would work.
Paul–
You just suggested I make my server an open relay for spammers. Catching the auto-reply bounces better would do the same thing (as noted to Geof above).
What about setting an autoresponder acknowledging receipt but also at the bottom of the form stating that ‘you will receive confirmation of this submission, if you do not receive within 24 hours please resubmit’. Then again, the prospect may feel that is too much hassle and will they even read the ‘note’ in the first place? People just simply don’t double check things these days.
I have a simple function that confirms an email is valid before it allows the form to get submitted.
Not sure if this will work, but I’m pasting my function here:
if ( !function_exists( ‘check_email’ ) ) {
function check_email($email) {
return preg_match(‘/^[a-z0-9_\-\.]+@[a-z0-9_\-\.]+\.[a-z]{2,4}$/’, $email);
}
}
That doesn’t help if the typo is in the username or domain. Also, check out the FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL filter:
http://www.php.net/m[...]validate.php
Yep. Of course yours is better.
/me hangs head in shame
I just learned about the filter stuff last week – handy!
Zend Framework has an email validation class that can optionally check that the given email address has MX records that can be contacted before the form is submitted.
You could return the user to the form with an error message like you would any other validation check if the test fails. Haven’t used it myself, but the implementation looks simple enough.
See http://framework.zen[...]mail_address
As Arron said, you could do an MX lookup on the domain and if nothing gets returned, you know the domain is bad. Not helpful for establishing if the username is valid but it gets you halfway there.
I think you’re dismissing the “type it twice” option too easily. The vast majority of people will not use copy and paste, and those who will use copy and paste are not people who mistype their email address without noticing it.
I think we mostly get typos because the users just couldn’t see clearly what they were typing. Now if we increased the font and used a monospaced type we could get a dramatic decrease in typos. It’s not a silver bullet but it should help.
[…] Alex King is asking for feedback on email address typos. This is a cronic problem that impacts all bloggers and web publishers and forums. You want to communicate with someone, but the email on the contact form is wrong. How do we improve this interface so the user isn’t bothered by the hoops they have to jump through? These are his solutions: * Use mailto: links instead of contact forms. Rejected because we want to request people give us more information in what they send in. Also because mailto: links don’t work with webmail unless you’ve jumped through hoops. * Challenge-response. Save the message in a queue and send a confirmation email to the sender that has a link in it. They have to click the link to have the message sent. Rejected because it’s annoying and there is no good way for people to get back to their message if they did typo their email address. * A little inline pop-up confirmation that shows their name and email and says “this is how we should contact you, right?†when they hit send. I haven’t rejected this completely yet, but it does feel like an annoyance. […]