Check your audience for bots

Happy Friday, reporters! I have a fun one today – or at least, a fun name. In publishing this newsletter over the last 10 years, I’ve definitely learned a lot about newsletters, email outreach and the nitty gritty of delivery.

Bouncer is a tool that checks for bots. It kind of reminds me of Botometer, but for a whole audience of email addresses. It has one of my favorite tool names in recent memory, since it identifies email bounces and kicks bots out of your space.

Kickbox is another tool with a great name, but a bit more expensive. The downside of both is that they’re not free. Both tools give you 100 free bot verifications, but that’s not much.

That may be a pretty arcane tool – I don’t know how many of you are actually verifying email audiences out there. But bots have become a pretty unavoidable problem on the web these days – on social media, comments, newsletters, everything. Don’t let them slide by, reporters!