What's the deal with people subscribing to my SaaS newsletter with emails formatted like this mY.nAMe@sOMEcoMpANY.COM

[josephhayes]

For context, I have a basic form at the bottom of my SaaS website that collects emails (for those who don't want to convert). I'm finding an increasing number of submitted (and yes, verified) emails formatted in this way, is it a bot, spam, or some other tool? The companies (domains) seem legit when I check them out but I'm just curious about this pattern and if I should expect more of it. TIA!

 

[deborah137]

@josephhayes I believe they do that so when someone sends them spam using the same upper/lower case combo, they know who shared their email.

As long as the emails are legit, I won't look too much into it.

 

[josephhayes]

@deborah137 Seems to be the consensus here, thanks

 

[devaofprayze]

@deborah137 Hmmmm, what about SaaS operators that convert addresses to lowercase before writing to the database?

 

[deborah137]

@devaofprayze Welp, no more email tracking then

 

[christina1979]

@josephhayes convert to lowecase and be happy

 

[josephhayes]

@christina1979 Haha, not unhappy, just hoping to learn why things are the way they are.

 

[lovelydove]

@josephhayes Anyone can buy a domain and setup a catchall email address so you can generate 10000's of legit looking email addresses

Bots are doing nasty stuff nowadays - At one point I had 1000 subscribers to my newsletter in one month (usually get 1-5 subscribers per month!) - Turns out, it was bots. Try to implement a honeypot and see how the conversions rate go. Honey pots are just inputs which are hidden in css visibility but if they contain anything, it's a bot so you don't svae the data.

Oh yeah, the format you're mentioning is most likely someone typing with caps lock and then hitting caps again sOMEcOMPANY ..

 

[josephhayes]

@lovelydove That's wild. What would the endgame be subscribing to your newsletter with 1000 emails??

 

[lovelydove]

@josephhayes Most where rubbis emails (non existent, etc)

There are many probabilities... my cybersec and dev brain has some. I think bots want to see from which email you send mails so they target you (especially personal blogs), Maybe to raise up your bounce rate, incur higher costs.

I know of people who never check who's subscribed

 

[josephhayes]

@lovelydove Thanks for explaining that, I'll try to keep tabs on this and see if anything fishy happens