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Typo-squat

published · September 13, 2026

A typo-squat is a domain registered on a common misspelling of a popular one — gmial.com for gmail.com — that resolves and accepts every address so that misdirected mail can be harvested.

A typo-squat is a domain registered on a common misspelling of a popular one — gmial.com, hotmial.com, yaho.com — by someone who wants the mail people send there by mistake. It resolves, it runs mail servers, and it accepts every address, so a verifier that only checks DNS and the mailbox handshake reports a typo-squatted address as deliverable while the password reset goes to a stranger.

What Spaw answers

A curated map of typo-squats is consulted before the handshake: an address at one of them answers risky with the reason likely_typo, the likely_typo weight of 60, and the intended address in did_you_mean, without any probe being spent. The map lists only domains that can never be a legitimate mailbox provider; a misspelling that does not resolve at all is answered by the dead-domain suggester instead.

What it does not mean

Not every look-alike is a squat — some belong to the provider itself, some to real companies — which is why the map is curated by hand rather than generated, and why an unmapped domain that accepts mail is never second-guessed.

Related

markdown version: /glossary/typo-squat.md

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More glossary

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