A typo in an email is not spam: how to help visitors submit the form on the first try

A visitor fills in your form and types gmail.con instead of gmail.com. If you point out the typo right away, they fix one letter and send the form. And you get a new customer with a working address you can reply to.

This happens a lot on phones: autocorrect, a small keyboard, people in a hurry. Pointing out the mistake is easy, and below we show how to set it up in a couple of minutes.

Why the form doesn’t accept that address

CleanTalk checks whether the email entered in the form actually exists. Spammers very often use made-up addresses, so a mailbox or domain that doesn’t exist is a strong reason for us to block the submission. In that case the visitor sees the message “*** Forbidden. EMAIL_ADDRESS: Email does not exist. ***” (what this message means).

There are usually three reasons:

1. The address is made up. This is exactly what the check is for.
2. The person made a typo. The check is right, that address doesn’t exist, but it’s a real customer.
3. The recipient’s mail server doesn’t respond to the check. This mostly happens with corporate or self-hosted mail.

Below we talk about the second and third cases. Typical typos look like this:

Typed	Meant	What happened
gmail.con, gmail.comm	gmail.com	extra or neighboring letter in the domain zone
icloud.co	icloud.com	zone cut short
ahoo.com, hotmial.com	yahoo.com, hotmail.com	missing or swapped letter
company-indusries.com	company-industries.com	typo in the company domain

Often the person just doesn’t see the mistake and thinks the site is broken. A hint at the right moment solves that.

Option 1: show the error before the form is sent

The best time for a hint is while the person is still in the field, not after they click the button. The CleanTalk plugin for WordPress has an option for this: Show email existence alert when filling in the field. The plugin checks the address right after it’s entered and shows the result as an icon inside the email field. The person sees something is wrong and fixes it.

You can turn it on here: Settings > Anti-Spam by CleanTalk > Advanced settings > Data Processing. Then open your form and enter an address with a typo, so you see exactly what your visitors will see.

The hint works in these forms:

• WooCommerce checkout
• Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, WPForms, Ninja Forms, FluentForms
• standard WordPress comment and registration forms

In the same section there’s also Check email before POST request. It checks the address in advance while the person fills in the other fields, so the form submits faster. It doesn’t show an icon, but it doesn’t get in the way either.

Option 2: set up the form itself

Some typos can be prevented before any check at all, using just the form settings.

• Email field type. On a phone this opens a keyboard with @ and a dot, and autocorrect won’t “fix” the address. In form builders this field is usually just called “Email”, not “Text”.
• Autofill. With autocomplete="email" the browser fills in the saved address as a whole, so there are no new typos. But the browser may have saved the address with a mistake at some point and now fills it in every time. So autofill doesn’t replace the check from option 1, the hint in the field will catch that mistake too.
• General message for blocked submissions. The message about a non-existent email comes from the CleanTalk plugin itself, and you can’t change the text for this specific error. But in the CleanTalk dashboard, in your site settings, you can set your own general message for blocked submissions (how to set your own text). You can ask people to double-check their email for typos there, so the visitor is told about the mistake once more.

We don’t recommend a “Confirm email” field. If you have one, keep in mind that typing the address by hand a second time is one more chance to make a mistake. The form takes longer, it annoys visitors, and people often just copy the address from the first field, typo included.

If the address is correct but the form doesn’t accept it

Sometimes the address is real, but the mail server doesn’t respond to the check. This happens with corporate and self-hosted mail when the server isn’t set up according to SMTP rules (RFC 5321). For example, the domain has no proper MX record, or the server answers the RCPT TO command incorrectly, and that command is how we check whether the mailbox exists. What you can do:

1. Check the address manually with the email checker on the CleanTalk site. You’ll see right away what the problem is.
2. Add the address to your personal whitelist in the CleanTalk dashboard if you trust the sender. The email check itself can’t be turned off in the plugin settings, it’s part of the spam protection. The whitelist works as an exception for a specific address.
3. Contact support if addresses from a whole domain are rejected. Send us an example address and the time of submission, and we’ll look at how that domain’s mail server responds. You can open a ticket at cleantalk.org/my/support/open or email support@cleantalk.org.

If someone really can’t send the form from their work email, they can use an address on a large mail service. But that’s a fallback, not a fix for your site.

A two-minute checklist

• Show email existence alert when filling in the field is turned on.
• The address field has the email type and autofill works.
• A general message for blocked submissions is set in the dashboard and asks to check the email.
• The form is tested with a typo (gmail.con) on both a computer and a phone.

A typo is a reason to give the visitor a hint. The email check is there to filter spam, because spammers very often use made-up addresses. And with a hint in the field it also helps real people send the form on the first try.

CleanTalk does everything it can so the visitor learns about the mistake and has time to fix it: a hint in the field before sending and a message with the reason after. All you need to do is turn on the hint and test your form once.