Email Deliverability

MBaerbock
Participant

Is anyone else seeing lots of numeric email addresses from web forms?

SOLVE

Hi everyone.  For several months now we've been receiving web form submissions containing email addresses with only numbers.  For example, "1112223333@vtext.com" and "4445556666@txt.att.net" (not real prefix part).  Has anyone else been seeing this trend, and if you have, how have you dealt with it?  Are there cases where these would actually be valid?  HubSpot doesn't appear able to block it using default anti-spam/bot filtering.  A marketing email send through HubSpot was also auto-paused at one point due to these being seen as deliverability issues.  There also doesn't appear to be a workflow I can create to auto-delete, although I also don't want to potentially delete something invalid.  Any ideas?

1 Accepted solution
danmoyle
Solution
Most Valuable Member | Elite Partner
Most Valuable Member | Elite Partner

Is anyone else seeing lots of numeric email addresses from web forms?

SOLVE

Great question on how they're getting submitted, @MBaerbock. Have you looked into a sampling of them to see their original or latest source? 

 

As for the filter, one option to test might be "email starts with" and then each number:

Screenshot 2025-01-16 at 2.48.19 PM.png

 

I'd test that to start with and see what comes up. 

 

I agree - it would be great if there was an easier way to automate this and protect against spammy, garbage emails like that. If it were me, I'd try to see if there's a specific place these are coming from - like is it one form? Is that form somehow more susceptible to spam? 

 

Did my answer help? Please "mark as a solution" to help others find answers. Plus I really appreciate it!


Dan Moyle

HubSpot Advisor

LearningOps | Impulse Creative

emailAddress
dan@impulsecreative.com
website
https://impulsecreative.com/

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4 Replies 4
danmoyle
Most Valuable Member | Elite Partner
Most Valuable Member | Elite Partner

Is anyone else seeing lots of numeric email addresses from web forms?

SOLVE

Hey there @MBaerbock and welcome to the Community! I've read that emails with numbers like that and followed by those domains are related to SMS gateway addresses - valid email-to-text gateways used by mobile carriers to send text messages to phone numbers. Are you using SMS marketing in any way currently? 

 

Some options for helping deal with this could include using double-opt-in for new contacts to confirm their intention to get emails from you, creating an active list for supression (and deletion) based on email parameters where they only include numbers or the domains you notice becoming a pattern, or maybe embracing it and ensuring your emails are optimized for both email and SMS viewing, as these addresses will receive your content as text messages. 

 

I'd also keep a close eye on the engagement rates of these addresses and remove unengaged contacts regularly. It might be an admin task for a bit to see how they interact. 

 

Did my answer help? Please "mark as a solution" to help others find answers. Plus I really appreciate it!


Dan Moyle

HubSpot Advisor

LearningOps | Impulse Creative

emailAddress
dan@impulsecreative.com
website
https://impulsecreative.com/
MBaerbock
Participant

Is anyone else seeing lots of numeric email addresses from web forms?

SOLVE

Thanks for the reply!  We are not doing any SMS marketing/messaging.  Just email and pulling lists for direct mail.  Based on that, I assume the numeric prefixed emails aren't valid for email marketing if gearing more toward SMS?  I'm not sure at this point how those are even coming through a web-based form within an email field if not bot-generated which I would think CAPTCHA would catch.

I don't see a way to create an active list filter for just numbers in the email prefix, but please let me know if anything I'm missing for how to do that.  🙂  The most I've seen we can do within HubSpot itself is to block at the domain level (like vtext.com or txt.att.net) as part of the form options.  Support did reply when I asked and I'm aware of double-opt in we could try implementing using external vendor plug-ins.  I just don't want this to be a hassle and I wish there was a filter I could apply that was simply "is a number" as the email prefix, or a way to check via more advanced filtering.

danmoyle
Solution
Most Valuable Member | Elite Partner
Most Valuable Member | Elite Partner

Is anyone else seeing lots of numeric email addresses from web forms?

SOLVE

Great question on how they're getting submitted, @MBaerbock. Have you looked into a sampling of them to see their original or latest source? 

 

As for the filter, one option to test might be "email starts with" and then each number:

Screenshot 2025-01-16 at 2.48.19 PM.png

 

I'd test that to start with and see what comes up. 

 

I agree - it would be great if there was an easier way to automate this and protect against spammy, garbage emails like that. If it were me, I'd try to see if there's a specific place these are coming from - like is it one form? Is that form somehow more susceptible to spam? 

 

Did my answer help? Please "mark as a solution" to help others find answers. Plus I really appreciate it!


Dan Moyle

HubSpot Advisor

LearningOps | Impulse Creative

emailAddress
dan@impulsecreative.com
website
https://impulsecreative.com/
MBaerbock
Participant

Is anyone else seeing lots of numeric email addresses from web forms?

SOLVE

Thank you.  With the suggested filter, most (95%?) of the email addresses are the numeric-only ones, although not all.  They do all originate from our email newsletter sign-up form, so there is that commonality.  

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