Email Validation & Why It’s Important For Optin

by James Carner Managing Director and CEO

Daily, we receive prospects with opt-in lists that are looking to get rid of bounces. Verification will do that easily, however, there are many things to consider before giving up on validation.

Validation is a fail safe maneuver. You never want to have questionable email addresses in your lists. And what are questionable email addresses that email list validation will remove?

1.) Temporary email addresses

a. Consumers are now using temporary email addresses to fill out forms. These emails are throwaways and are useless after a certain amount of time. Mailing to these weekly will harm your sender reputation.

2.) Misspelled email addresses

a. In example, yaoo.com or yahhoo.com or yagoo.com. This happens when consumers are in a hurry to fill out a form or do it on purpose.

b. Many ask us to fix these email addresses, but we discourage that. Fixing an email doesn’t necessarily make it correct. It still could be a bounce.

c. Misspelled emails should be removed and not fixed. It’s up to the list owner to fix these one by one in our opinion.

3.) Complainers

a. Complainers (we call them “protestors”) can discourage your email service provider. Although (and unfortunately) many support spam and are not quick to respond to abuse, it could determine where the ESP places you on their IP rotation. If weekly, you receive a complaint ratio that exceeds their policies, they could place you on already damaged IP’s to save their whitelisting. Protestors can also lead to spamtraps. You need to know who is a protestor and who isn’t so you can determine whether to keep them in your list.

4.) Traps

a. Beginner spam fighters will fill out forms to start their black hole if they do not have real time white listed checking. If you have a list of over 50,000, it’s likely there could be a trap in there. Spam fighters do not expose their email traps to let them do their job so you could have a trap in there for years. Expired domains can turn into traps so the older your list is, the chances of there being a trap in there is quite high.

5.) Syntax, Unicode & format errors

a. Here’s a common issue. Transferring files from mac to windows regardless if the file is csv or not can actually add characters and/or Unicode issues that can confuse ESP systems or programs you are using to manipulate data.

6.) False positives

a. Our real time email validation system checks the mx records and if they are setup correctly not including all of the questions we ask of the website if it’s parked, has an index file or other warning signs.

7.) Slow response

a. Non-TLD domains may have slow response times when checking the mx record.

8.) Bad MX

a. If the MX isn’t setup correctly, chances are the email will bounce.

9.) Invalid

a. Two @ signs in an email or 4 or more periods (dots) or .com.com.

This article first appeared at ehygienics.com