Email address verification is a standard practice followed by marketers nowadays in the email marketing industry. This process prevents users form using fraudulent and unreachable email addresses. The illegal practice of ‘spoofing’ has caused much problems and hence many countries have created laws according to which marketers have to all verify email address in their databases they use to send emails and field responses.
Validation of email addresses benefits online marketing campaigns by enhancing deliverability and protecting sender’s reputation.An Email Address Verification process is used to check whether a list of email addresses is authentic and deliverable. Largely offered as a hosted software/services, the email address validation process involves analyzing emails from the uploaded list, address-by-address, to check their validity and deliverability.
The Process Of Validating An Email Address
The validity of an email address can be determined with the help of a combination of validation techniques, and internal databases inspection with some proprietary algorithms. After the validation process is done, the invalid email ids are filtered out and the result is a clean email list that is legitimate and all set for business and marketing requirements. A detailed description of how an email verification process is carried out is as follows:
- Syntax Check – A syntax check will remove any incorrectly formatted email ids and validate them as per the Internet Engineering Task Force standards.
- Domain or MX records check – This process examines the DNS entries of the email addresses. An email address is marked invalid if the MX entry is missing or domain is invalid.
- Role-based Account Identification – Email address specific to job roles such as postmaster@, support@, info@, hr@, admin@, sales@, etc. are identified in this process and flagged accordingly.
- DEA Detection – Disposable email addresses or DEA refers to temporarily email addresses used by users to overcome the need of giving their real email id. However, these ids are used by spiteful users so as to fool user registration systems and cause great damage to marketing efforts done by businesses. This process detects and processes such addresses.
- Honeypot or Spam Trap detection – In this process, all email addresses are checked against a known list of email addresses to detect BOTs, spam seeds, black list, honeypots, or bogus emails addresses.
- Checking DNSBLs for blacklisting – A DNS based black hole list provides a list of IP addresses which are used for spamming. In this process, the email list is checked against the known list of DNSBLs or RBLs and URI DNSBLs to trap spam networks.
- Final verification: This process performs a thorough level of SMTP verification on each email address where each email address is verified for mailbox existence without posting actual emails on that address.