3 ways bulk email verification can prevent free trial abuse
Businesses have learned how to mend the weak spots in free trial marketing.
- Free trials are an excellent marketing tool but people can take advantage of the system by using disposable emails, jumping from one free trial to the next.
- You can use free trial marketing to great effect if you know how to protect your business against those who want to take advantage.
- Here are 3 ways to identify email addresses that will never lead to a genuine sale and remove them from your lists.
Isn't it a fundamental consumer right to try a product or service before purchase to make sure it works? Then again, not all consumers are as ethical as we would like to believe. Quite a few never end up purchasing licenses or subscriptions and are content with abusing free trials by primarily using disposable email addresses. Companies can, however, fight back against free trial abuse with the help of a bulk email validation solution. Here are three ways how.
Limit registration to non-disposable email address users
Protection against freemium abuse begins upon signup. Limiting registration to only those who don't use disposable email addresses is one way to do that. You can integrate a bulk email verification API into your registration page or use a disposable email domains database like the one provided by WhoisXML API to automatically check if the email address a subscriber provided is disposable or not. A useful bulk email validation tool would tell your administrator immediately that the address is disposable, and so it's likely you're dealing with someone who might try to abuse a free trial.
Make sure the email address is contactable
Not all freemium abusers use disposable email addresses. Some can just as easily use personal email addresses from Gmail, Yahoo, or other free services. A lot of people keep extra email addresses to direct email marketing or newsletters to. It's one way to keep their primary personal inboxes less crowded.
Since these secondary email addresses probably get tons of marketing collateral each day, they're likely full, and so messages will sooner or later bounce. That's not good for any company as it translates to a high bounce rate, which can adversely affect its email deliverability and domain reputation.
A robust bulk email validation API can instantly let you know if all the email addresses in your contact database are accessible. It tells you if every address is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)-enabled and, therefore, able to receive messages. So, if you, for instance, have the email address soon_be_to_nothing@yahoo.com in your database, which has an email verification result that says it isn't SMTP-reachable, it may be best to take it off your distribution list to lower your bounce rate.
Taking the email address that's probably no longer in use off your subscription list is also advisable. That way, your chances of dealing with a freemium abuser is reduced as well.
Keep your distribution list in tip-top shape
The more unreachable email addresses in your distribution list, the higher the chances of ending up in someone's blacklist. It is, after all, not uncommon for spammers or cybercriminals to use the shotgun approach in attacks. Sending messages to as many inboxes as possible, after all, increases their chances of success. Using their tactic for a legitimate business, however, is unacceptable either. Organizations are not allowed to send emails to just about anyone without their consent.
And so companies that want to stay off blacklists should make it a point to keep their distribution lists updated at all times. But we also know that over time, contact lists can grow to a massive size, making cleanup tedious and time-consuming. The quickest way to keep email databases in tip-top condition is to use a bulk email validation solution. It lets you check up to 50,000 email addresses in one go to make sure that they won't do your domain reputation any harm and cause you to end up on a dreaded blacklist.
Bulk Email Verification API/Lookup can confirm if each email address:
- Has the correct syntax or follows established Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards
- Is not disposable by checking its domain against those of known disposable email providers that include Mailinator, GuerrillaMail, and more than 2,000 others
- Has a corresponding mail server evidenced by properly configured mail exchanger (MX) records
- Points to a valid inbox that lessens your chances of dealing with suspicious users
- Is not associated with a catch-all mailbox that isn't assigned to any particular user and so may not add value to your distribution list
While allowing every potential subscriber to try your product/service free of charge is a great thing, you still need a way to keep the system honest. Strike a balance between keeping free trial abuse to a minimum and encouraging individuals to register for your offerings with the help of bulk email validation solutions.
These are the world’s greatest threats in 2021
We look back at a year ravaged by a global pandemic, economic downturn, political turmoil and the ever-worsening climate crisis.
Billions are at risk of missing out on the digital leap forward, as growing disparities challenge the social fabric.
Image: Global Risks Report 2021
<h3>Widespread effects</h3><p>"The immediate human and economic costs of COVID-19 are severe," the report says. "They threaten to scale back years of progress on reducing global poverty and inequality and further damage social cohesion and global cooperation."</p><p>For those reasons, the pandemic demonstrates why infectious diseases hits the top of the impact list. Not only has COVID-19 led to widespread loss of life, it is holding back economic development in some of the poorest parts of the world, while amplifying wealth inequalities across the globe.</p><p>At the same time, there are concerns the fight against the pandemic is taking resources away from other critical health challenges - including a <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/charts-covid19-malnutrition-educaion-mental-health-children-world/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">disruption to measles vaccination programmes</a>.</p>Columbia study finds new way to extract energy from black holes
A new study explains how a chaotic region just outside a black hole's event horizon might provide a virtually endless supply of energy.
- In 1969, the physicist Roger Penrose first proposed a way in which it might be possible to extract energy from a black hole.
- A new study builds upon similar ideas to describe how chaotic magnetic activity in the ergosphere of a black hole may produce vast amounts of energy, which could potentially be harvested.
- The findings suggest that, in the very distant future, it may be possible for a civilization to survive by harnessing the energy of a black hole rather than a star.
The ergosphere
<p>The ergosphere is a region just outside a black hole's event horizon, the boundary of a black hole beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. But light and matter just outside the event horizon, in the ergosphere, would also be affected by the immense gravity of the black hole. Objects in this zone would spin in the same direction as the black hole at incredibly fast speeds, similar to objects floating around the center of a whirlpool.</p><p>The Penrose process states, in simple terms, that an object could enter the ergosphere and break into two pieces. One piece would head toward the event horizon, swallowed by the black hole. But if the other piece managed to escape the ergosphere, it could emerge with more energy than it entered with.</p><p>The movie "Interstellar" provides an example of the Penrose process. Facing a fuel shortage on a deep-space mission, the crew makes a last-ditch effort to return home by entering the ergosphere of a blackhole, ditching part of their spacecraft, and "slingshotting" away from the black hole with vast amounts of energy.</p><p>In a recent study published in the American Physical Society's <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.023014" target="_blank" style="">Physical Review D</a><em>, </em>physicists Luca Comisso and Felipe A. Asenjo used similar ideas to describe another way energy could be extracted from a black hole. The idea centers on the magnetic fields of black holes.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Black holes are commonly surrounded by a hot 'soup' of plasma particles that carry a magnetic field," Comisso, a research scientist at Columbia University and lead study author, told <a href="https://news.columbia.edu/energy-particles-magnetic-fields-black-holes" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Columbia News</a>.</p>Ergosphere representation
<p>In the ergosphere of a rotating black hole, magnetic field lines are constantly breaking and reconnecting at fast speeds. The researchers theorized that when these lines reconnect, plasma particles shoot out in two different directions. One flow of particles shoots off against the direction of the spinning black hole, eventually getting "swallowed" by the black hole. But the other flow shoots in the same direction as the spin, potentially gaining enough velocity to escape the black hole's gravitational pull.</p><p>The researchers proposed that this occurs because the breaking and reconnecting of magnetic field lines can generate negative-energy particles. If the negative-energy particles get "swallowed" by the black hole, the positive particles would theoretically be exponentially accelerated.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Our theory shows that when magnetic field lines disconnect and reconnect, in just the right way, they can accelerate plasma particles to negative energies and large amounts of black hole energy can be extracted," Comisso said. "It is like a person could lose weight by eating candy with negative calories."</p>Black hole
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
<p>While there might not be immediate applications for the theory, it could help scientists better understand and observe black holes. On an abstract level, the findings may expand the limits of what scientists imagine is possible in deep space.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Thousands or millions of years from now, humanity might be able to survive around a black hole without harnessing energy from stars," Comisso said. "It is essentially a technological problem. If we look at the physics, there is nothing that prevents it."</p>A psychiatric diagnosis can be more than an unkind ‘label’
A popular and longstanding wave of thought in psychology and psychotherapy is that diagnosis is not relevant for practitioners in those fields.



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