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Free vs business email addresses

A free email address is one at a provider that gives anyone a personal mailbox, such as Gmail, Outlook.com or Yahoo; a business address sits on the company's own domain. B2B teams ask for work email because the domain tells them which company a lead belongs to. Blocking free addresses outright, though, also turns away freelancers, sole traders and small firms that run their business from a personal mailbox, and it invites people to invent a work address instead. In most forms it works better to accept both, ask for the company separately, and use a free-provider flag to route leads rather than reject them.

What counts as a free provider

Our glossary defines a free email provider as a service that gives anyone a personal mailbox at no cost. In practice, lists of such domains reach well beyond the big three. HubSpot's list of domains it blocks when a form refuses free providers includes, for example:

Two cases cause confusion:

Why B2B teams ask for work email

The reasons are practical:

Why blocking free addresses loses real buyers

Forms that refuse free providers are common enough that HubSpot offers it as a switch: with Block free email providers turned on, a visitor with a blocked domain is asked to enter a different address before the form submits. Before you turn on such a switch, think about who meets it:

Some of these leave. Others type an address that passes the rule but is not theirs, or not real. That is worse than a Gmail address: a made-up name at a real company domain bounces later, or, on a domain that accepts mail for every address, cannot be confirmed at all. You trade a lead you could have reached for one you cannot.

Better options than a hard block

  1. Ask for the company in its own field. A company name or website field gives sales the account without restricting the email address. Keep it optional where you can.
  2. Use a soft prompt. When someone enters a free address, show a short note such as "Using a work address helps us connect you with your team," and still accept the submission.
  3. Route instead of rejecting. Send free-address leads into a self-serve or nurture track, and leads on company domains to sales. Re-score a lead when the person later adds a company.
  4. Enrich business domains only. Looking up a company from its domain works for business addresses; for free ones, ask the person instead. Enrichment that adds data about a person comes with duties (see privacy and consent). Never append email addresses to records from another source: M3AAWG calls email appending abusive.
  5. Require a work domain only where the product needs it, for example to put colleagues into one team workspace. A newsletter or a whitepaper download rarely needs it.

Company domains: role and catch-all addresses

A business domain does not make an address safe to mail. Two things are common on company domains:

Only a confirmation email proves that a person controls the address, whatever the domain (double opt-in). And consent to marketing depends on how you collected the address, not on whether it is personal or business (bought email lists).

Our free-provider flag

Every result of the validation API has a field free_email, which the API reference describes as true when the domain is a free consumer mailbox service. Bulk results carry it as the column ev_free_email. An excerpt of a result for a Gmail address that accepts mail:

{
  "status": "valid",
  "reason": "accepted",
  "action": "send",
  "free_email": true,
  "role_account": false
}

The flag is a description, not a verdict: whether to send still follows the action field. For a malformed address the flags are null, and an unknown result can carry fields the check learned before it stopped, so rely on status and reason there. In a form, read the flag after the deliverability decision from the sign-up form recipe and use it for routing or a soft prompt.

Privacy and consent

This is general information, not legal advice; the rules that apply depend on where you and your leads are.

Questions

Should I block Gmail addresses on a demo request form?

Usually not. Accept them, ask for the company in a separate field, and route the lead by what you learn. Block only when your product truly needs a company domain, and say why.

Is a Google Workspace address a free email address?

No. It uses the company's own domain, so it is a business address, even though Google hosts the mailbox.

Does a business domain mean the address exists?

No. The mailbox can be missing, a role address or on a catch-all domain. Check it, and confirm it with an email when it matters.

Try it

Enter an address in the free email checker to see its status and flags, or add the check to your form with the email verification API.

Sources

How we wrote this: drafted by the email-validation.org team with the help of AI writing tools, from our product documentation and the sources linked in the text.

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