I have been told I am too technical when it comes to explaining email validation service and email verification services, so I thought it warrants an article explaining what we do in the simplest form. So here we go. Email marketing is the practice of sending more than one email at once. Some call it bulk and some call it a blast. Regardless of the phrases, it sends one email message to more than one person. Because email marketing is still very popular and still makes money for all kinds of industries, it warrants companies that clean up these email marketing lists so the sender can continue to put out their broadcast.

Email verification services is the process of matching and removing email addresses that do not belong in an email list. Those emails that are removed can be incorrectly spelled emails or emails belonging to someone who does not want to receive what you are sending to them. They also can be matched against an email that doesn’t exist or they could be an email belonging to an attorney who understands the laws according to the CAN-SPAM Act which in turn can threaten litigation if they feel wronged by the message that was sent by the sender. Whether the email was typed wrong, or belongs to a person who doesn’t want your information or if the email doesn’t exist, email verification and validation services remove these.

After the emails are removed, they are placed into what is called a suppression. Many people use these suppressions to match and remove from future lists they acquire. A suppression cannot be built unless one sends bulk emails and monitors their feedback loops. These are messages from the recipient that tells you why the email was rejected. Email verification companies have several processes that they do to an email marketing list. One is static lists which means a simple list of emails that is updated with more emails. They also have ways of fixing emails with spaces or extra periods and/or at signs. They call that syntax errors (fixing).

There are also static domains they match against and strings which are words, phrases or codes inside emails that are considered threats. After fixing the email, they start asking questions about the recipient. The mail exchange (administrator on the other end who is receiving the email) will respond to the sender with a number of responses. They can tell the sender that their information is setup properly or can send a response code saying why the email the sender is using is having problems (bounces). Many email service providers will not accept email marketing lists that have bounces so they need an email verification service to fix those.