How to verify emails in forms & surveys?

When you collect email IDs on forms and surveys, it is hard to verify whether they are valid. You often find out only when you send a message and it bounces. To check ahead of time, you might run the addresses through a service like an email bounce checker. BlockSurvey includes an option to validate emails for bounce. That said, no bounce checker is foolproof. With free temp emails and relay services like Hide My Email (offered by Apple, which forwards to your real inbox), collecting the actual address has become harder. This is where BlockSurvey helps. Below is how to collect verified emails from Gmail, Outlook, and more.

Why use email verification in forms and surveys?

• Reduces spam and bots: Spammers and bots often use invalid or temp email addresses. Email verification filters out these entries, so you end up with cleaner, more reliable data.
• Protects your email reputation: When you email people using addresses you have collected, unvalidated addresses risk bouncing. A lot of bounce reports can get your address flagged as spam, which is costly and damages your domain's reputation. Verifying addresses as you collect them prevents these problems.
• Reduces maintenance: Filtering out invalid or duplicate addresses at the start saves you time on data cleaning later. That means less manual work and more time to analyze the results.

How do you use email verification in BlockSurvey?

BlockSurvey offers two ways to collect email addresses.

1. Email Component: This is the classic approach, where users type their email address into an input field. 
   
   
   By default, every email received is checked against our internal privacy-focused email bounce checker, which tells you whether it is likely to bounce. You will see this in the responses as hard bounce, soft bounce, and no bounce.
   
   
2. Email Providers: This is a newer approach that solves the problem directly. You can add email providers like Google (Gmail), Microsoft (Outlook), and more that are on the way, to collect verified email IDs. This removes the guesswork of whether an address is valid. The screenshots below show how each one looks.
   
   Google(Gmail)
   
   
   Microsoft(Outlook)
   
   

You can also confirm the authenticity of a submission by accepting it only once, using prevent duplicate submissions. This feature is turned on by default under the Options tab of the email verification questions.

Some use cases for this feature

Here are a few ways we have used it. Feel free to get creative beyond these.

• Event registration: Events often need pre-registration through online forms. Verifying email addresses confirms that the people registering are real and not spam bots, which makes communication and event planning easier.
• Newsletter sign-ups: Businesses and bloggers use email forms to grow their subscriber lists. Email verification helps build a quality subscriber list and cuts down on newsletters sent to fake or non-existent addresses.
• Surveys with rewards: People tend to game surveys when there is a reward attached. In those cases, use the actual email provider to collect email IDs. This helps prevent automation, bots, and spam.

Email Verification Support Across Survey Tools

Here is how five common survey tools handle email verification, provider sign-in, disposable email blocking, and respondent anonymity, based on each vendor's own documentation.

"Not documented" means the vendor's public documentation did not confirm the capability at the time of writing, not that the feature is definitively absent.

Conclusion

Email verification helps you cut down on spam, bots, and duplicate entries, so your results stay cleaner and more reliable. BlockSurvey's email verification is flexible enough to handle respondents across different email providers, and it prevents duplicate submissions automatically to keep your data intact. Try email verification in BlockSurvey to improve how you collect responses.