Definition
A typo domain is a domain that looks like a popular email domain but is spelled wrong. Familiar patterns include swapped letters (gmial.com), missing letters (gmai.com, yaho.com), doubled letters, and wrong endings (gmail.con, hotmail.co when hotmail.com was meant).
They usually come from fast typing on phones and from autofill mistakes. The local part is correct and the person is real. They just typed their domain wrong.
Why it matters
What happens next depends on the domain:
- It does not exist or has no mail server. Mail hard-bounces.
- It is registered by someone else. Mail may be accepted and read by a stranger. That is a privacy problem if you send receipts or account details.
- It is a typo trap. Some misspelled domains are run as spam traps. Mailing them signals that you do not check addresses at collection.
In every case, you lose the customer. They never get the confirmation, the receipt or the password reset, and they may assume your product is broken.
The fix works best at the form. A "Did you mean [email protected]?" prompt, shown while the person is still on the page, recovers most of these sign-ups. Once the address is in your database, all you can do is drop it or guess.
How SimpleCold handles it
SimpleCold checks the domain against a list of known misspellings of the big consumer providers, such as gmial.com and hotmial.com, and against common top-level domain slips like .con and .cmo on any domain. When it finds one, the address comes back Undeliverable with the status possible_typo and the reason "Possible typo. Did you mean ...?", and the result includes a suggestion field with the likely correct address, for example [email protected] for [email protected]. In a bulk CSV download, the suggestion appears in its own Suggestion column, so you can review corrections before re-importing.
For forms, call the email verification API when the field loses focus and show the suggestion inline.