Hey there,
Something curious happened to me today. I got an email from Google asking me to log into my secondary Gmail account (that I’ve not used in years) to avoid deletion.
When I logged into the account I found 2,604 emails that weren’t for me. On further inspection, it seems someone has been signing up for various apps and services using my email account. Over half of these emails were from a food delivery service called Swiggy so while I don’t know anything else about them, I’m pretty confident that they can’t cook.
Anyway, none of these emails had been read, which tells me they didn’t actually get into my account. And apart from random notifications, there were some more concerning emails like 2FA codes from Facebook and security notifications from their other Gmail account. If I wanted to, I could probably get access to their accounts. In other words, they weren’t trying to scam or spam me but they clearly thought that MY email address was THEIR email address.
This happens more than you might think, especially if you have a relatively popular or generic email address. I once had to email a dating app asking them to close an account someone set up using my address because… well… I didn’t want to have to try and explain that to my husband. 😅
There are a whole host of security and other concerns for the people who are putting the wrong email address into forms. But if that form is on your website, it opens up a world of trouble for you too.
Let’s go back to those 1k+ Swiggy emails. I don’t want those in my inbox, even if it is my secondary inbox. So I bulk-selected every one and blocked them. Which automatically marks them as spam.
If you suddenly get over a thousand spam complaints, it’s probably going to put a bit of a dent in your sender reputation.
So you do not want people typing in the wrong email address into your forms. Even if it’s a real email address.
Luckily, there are a few different ways to prevent this and I’ve covered the basics on the blog in a guide to email validation for WordPress forms. If you’re not already validating form data that includes email addresses, I’d highly recommend taking a look.
And as for me, I will be logging into my secondary Gmail account a little more often and going and marking a few more emails as spam.
Until next week,
Rachel
Product Educator, WP Mail SMTP
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