Findings · 2026-08-13
Case study: every contact email on a live site bounced, for one character
A contractor site linked the same misspelled address on every page. Two DNS lookups proved it, and the fix took one line.
A Denver contracting site linked mailto: the same address on its homepage, its contact page, its quote page and every service page. It was the only email address anywhere on the site.
The domain in that address was misspelled — one transposed pair of letters away from the company’s own domain.
How we knew, rather than guessed
Two DNS lookups settled it:
- The misspelled domain: NXDOMAIN. No address record, no mail exchanger. It does not exist, so every message a visitor sent bounced.
- The correct domain: a live address record and Google Workspace mail exchangers. That mailbox receives.
That is the difference between a correction and a guess. We did not decide what the address should be — we established that only one spelling could receive mail at all.
Why nobody noticed
A bounce goes to the sender, not to the business. The owner sees fewer enquiries; nothing in any dashboard says why. There is no error state anywhere in the system — the form of failure is silence.
The general lesson
Contact details are the part of a site that a machine reads out loud, and the part nobody re-reads after launch. Check that every address, every phone number and every profile link on your site resolves to something that answers.
Every figure above came out of this scanner.
Point it at your own domain and see the same measurements, free.