It happens to everyone. You're on your phone, rushing to sign up for a new service, and you type [email protected] instead of gmail.com. You hit submit, wait for the confirmation email... and it never comes.
For the user, it's a minor frustration. They might assume your service is broken or the email went to spam. For you, the business owner, it's a silent disaster. You just lost a lead who was motivated enough to sign up, simply because of a clumsy thumb.
Mobile traffic now accounts for over 60% of web usage, and typing on a glass screen is prone to error. Studies estimate that up to 15% of email addresses entered into mobile forms contain typos. In a world where Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is skyrocketing, can you really afford to lose 15% of your hard-earned traffic to simple syntax errors?
The costs go deeper than just a lost signup.
If a user signs up with [email protected], they effectively become a ghost account. They receive no onboarding emails, no password resets, and no marketing nurture. If your average customer LTV is $100, every typo is a $100 bill set on fire.
Then comes the support overhead. "I signed up but never got the confirmation email." Your support team likely answers this ticket daily. They have to search the database, guess the typo, and manually fix it. This is expensive, unscalable work.
And finally, there is the reputation damage. If you attempt to send automated welcome emails to hotmial.com, they will hard bounce. High bounce rates signal to ISPs that you are a low-quality sender, hurting your deliverability for your valid users.
So, how do we fix it? The goal isn't to punish the user with a hard "Invalid Email" error; it's to help them fix it.
The best UX pattern is the "Did You Mean?" suggestion. You can tackle this by using lightweight open-source libraries. Popular npm packages like mailcheck or email-spell-checker are great starting points for client-side validation. They look for specific patterns and suggest corrections based on Levenshtein distance.
// Example using mailcheck
import mailcheck from 'mailcheck';
mailcheck.run({
email: userEmail,
domains: ['gmail.com', 'yahoo.com', 'hotmail.com'], // Add more top domains
suggested: function(suggestion) {
// Show "Did you mean [email protected]?"
setSuggestion(suggestion.full);
}
});These libraries are excellent for handling common typos instantly in the browser.
If you want to take it a step further, verification APIs can layer on additional intelligence. Beyond just fixing typos, they can help you identify disposable domains, verify MX records to ensure the inbox exists, and handle complex edge cases that static lists might miss.
Look, we all make typos. It’s just part of life online. If you can help your users catch them in the moment, everyone wins. You save yourself a support ticket, and they actually get the email they signed up for.
You could spend your weekends maintaining a regex list of every possible misspelling of "gmail.com". But honestly, life is too short for regex. If you ever need something more robust that handles the heavy lifting for you, we're around. 😉