How can I ensure deliverability when many signups are from qq.com addresses and what steps can I take to prevent spam signups?
Michael Ko
Co-founder & CEO, Suped
Published 15 Apr 2025
Updated 15 Aug 2025
7 min read
Dealing with email signups, especially when a significant portion comes from specific domains like QQ.com, presents a dual challenge. On one hand, you want to ensure your legitimate messages reach their intended recipients. On the other, you must combat an influx of spam signups that can severely damage your sender reputation and deliverability.
QQ.com is a major Chinese email provider, and it's common for many legitimate Chinese users to have addresses there. These often consist of numeric strings, which can sometimes be mistaken for bot-generated emails. However, if your audience isn't primarily Chinese, a large volume of QQ.com signups, particularly those with simple numerical patterns, might indicate a spam bot issue.
The key is to differentiate between genuine subscribers and automated signups. Failing to do so can lead to your emails being marked as spam, high bounce rates, and potential blacklisting (or blocklisting) of your sending IP or domain. This comprehensive approach addresses both QQ.com deliverability challenges and robust strategies to prevent spam signups on your forms.
Ensuring deliverability to QQ.com
Delivering emails to QQ.com (and other Chinese ISPs) can be particularly complex due to strict regulations, unique filtering rules, and a highly protective stance against unsolicited mail. Even with legitimate signups, you need to adhere to specific best practices to ensure your messages reach the inbox. Unlike many Western email providers, QQ.com has stringent requirements that often necessitate specific measures.
One of the most effective methods to improve deliverability to QQ.com is to pursue whitelisting directly with the ISP. While this can be a lengthy process and typically only available for high-volume senders with strong business ties in China, it significantly boosts inbox placement. For senders without a local presence or significant volume, focusing on impeccable sender reputation is even more critical. You might also want to understand if QQ email addresses are real to truly understand the nature of your signups.
Even if your QQ.com signups are legitimate, maintaining a clean list is paramount. High bounce rates or spam complaints from these addresses will negatively impact your overall sender reputation, affecting deliverability to all recipients, not just those on QQ.com. Regularly auditing your authentication settings, like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, is crucial for improving your sender trustworthiness.
Local presence: Consider a local email service provider (ESP) or IP address within China for better deliverability to Chinese ISPs.
Content compliance: Avoid sensitive keywords, political content, or anything that might be flagged by Chinese internet filters.
Encoding: Ensure your emails are correctly encoded to support Chinese characters (e.g., UTF-8).
Implementing robust signup prevention
The other side of the coin is preventing unwanted, bot-generated signups. These fake signups can quickly bloat your email lists, lead to high bounce rates, and increase spam complaints from invalid or unengaged addresses. This ultimately harms your sender reputation, making it harder for your legitimate emails to reach the inbox, including those to QQ.com users. Implementing robust prevention mechanisms is critical for maintaining healthy email deliverability and ensuring your messages reach real, interested recipients.
One of the most effective and simplest tactics is to enable double opt-in for all your signup forms. This ensures that a new subscriber explicitly confirms their email address before being added to your list. It's a powerful filter against bots and invalid addresses, as bots typically won't complete the second confirmation step. This also confirms a user's genuine interest, leading to higher engagement rates and fewer complaints down the line. You can learn more about how to prevent nefarious signups through this method.
Beyond double opt-in, integrating CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA verification on your signup forms can significantly reduce bot submissions. These tools present challenges that are easy for humans but difficult for automated scripts, helping to distinguish between real users and bots. You should also consider implementing a honeypot field, which is a hidden form field invisible to human users but detectable by bots. If a bot fills out this field, the submission is immediately flagged as spam and rejected. These techniques are crucial for preventing bot sign-ups and suspicious contacts.
Furthermore, implementing rate limiting on your signup forms can prevent a single IP address from submitting too many requests in a short period, a common tactic for bot attacks. Combining these methods creates a multi-layered defense against spam signups, protecting your sender reputation and ensuring your email marketing efforts are directed toward engaged audiences.
Before
Single opt-in: Bots easily subscribe, filling lists with fake addresses.
No CAPTCHA/Honeypot: Forms are vulnerable to automated submissions.
Even with strong signup prevention, some bad addresses might still slip through. Regularly auditing and cleaning your email list is a continuous process vital for maintaining good sender reputation and deliverability. This means identifying and removing inactive subscribers, bounced addresses, and those that generate spam complaints. A healthy list ensures your emails reach engaged recipients, improving your campaign performance and reducing the risk of being blacklisted (or blocklisted).
Pay close attention to your engagement metrics: open rates, click-through rates, and, most importantly, spam complaint rates. A low spam complaint rate, ideally under 0.3%, signals to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that your emails are valued by recipients. If you notice a spike in complaints, especially from unusual domains or numeric patterns, it's a strong indicator of list quality issues that need immediate attention.
Beyond active list cleaning, ensure your email authentication protocols are correctly configured. This includes SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These records verify that your emails are indeed from your domain and haven't been tampered with. Proper authentication builds trust with ISPs and is a fundamental component of good deliverability, especially when dealing with stricter providers like QQ.com. Regular DMARC monitoring can help you keep tabs on your authentication status.
DNS authentication records
Implementing strong email authentication is a cornerstone of good deliverability, especially when sending to challenging ISPs like QQ.com.
You can never entirely eliminate spam signups. However, by understanding the unique challenges of domains like QQ.com and implementing robust preventative measures, you can significantly improve your email deliverability. A combination of strict signup processes, continuous list hygiene, and proper authentication will help your legitimate emails reach the inbox while safeguarding your sender reputation.
Remember, proactive steps are always better than reactive ones. Investing in preventing bad signups upfront will save you countless headaches and lost revenue from undelivered emails in the long run. By prioritizing the health and quality of your email list, you lay a solid foundation for successful email marketing campaigns, regardless of where your subscribers originate.
Views from the trenches
Best practices
Implement double opt-in on all signup forms to ensure subscriber intent and validate email addresses.
Use CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA to differentiate between human users and automated bots.
Integrate honeypot fields into forms to catch and block bot submissions without user interaction.
Common pitfalls
Assuming all QQ.com signups are spam; some can be legitimate, especially if your audience has Chinese travelers.
Neglecting to implement basic bot prevention measures, leading to inflated lists and deliverability issues.
Not regularly cleaning your email list, which accumulates invalid addresses and spam traps.
Expert tips
Capture IP addresses and browser metadata during signup to build an audit trail for future analysis of suspicious activity.
Consider real-time email validation services that can identify invalid or disposable addresses at the point of entry.
For significant Chinese audiences, explore direct whitelisting processes with major Chinese ISPs like QQ.com.
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks says QQ.com addresses are most likely forged, and even if they aren't, delivering to QQ.com comes with extensive requirements and is a major deliverability challenge.
2021-02-23 - Email Geeks
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks says QQ addresses are not tied to phone numbers, but instead, they originated from Tencent's email server using a number-based system similar to ICQ.
QQ.com. Regular DMARC monitoring can help you keep tabs on your authentication status.
