What is the difference between email validation andemail verification?

The email list hygiene industry has metamorphosed into two categories. Email validation and emailverification. I have written several articles about the two separately on my blog, but I think it’s important toexplain both processes in one article so you can choose which is right for you if you are an email marketer.

Email validation concentrates on external threats and some return paths (bounces). Validation finds andremoves spamtraps, protestors, syntax errors, unicode characters, misspelled domains, incorrect strings,invalid and/or unlikely email characters, departments, erroneous mx, flawed domain setups and does IP threatmatching to removal. Validation does verification to some degree but cannot validate top-level domains likeYahoo, AOL, MSN, Hotmail and the like (free email service providers).

Verification focuses all of its efforts on the return path itself, which can be a bounce address (hard or soft), anenvelope from, envelope sender address, mail from or return address. In other words, when a sender executesa message, the recipient server could send a return response. In example: the mailbox is full, unavailable(such as not found), blocked, bad command, exceeded storage, failed transaction, syntax error, counterargument, requested action not taken and/or insufficient system storage or out of office reply just to name afew. There are dozens of return paths and in my next article I will list and explain all of them.

Ok, thanks for the explanation, James, but which of these two processes should I use? Good question.Validation would be needed for third party and/or old lists. Third party lists are traded, leased/rented or soldto where the list owner isn’t familiar with it. This industry practice is considered gorilla marketing and isfrowned upon, also said to be illegal according to some spam fighters. If your list falls in this category, beextremely careful and upfront about it when questioned by your ESP. The truth gets you far.

Old lists are the most common that we scrub and are quite dangerous. For example, if your list is over 5,000and you allowed it to sit for a month or two, you just made a colossal mistake. There are hundreds of articlesexplaining why you should constantly be emailing to your list and why, but they don’t get into the deeperreasons. Spam fighters have, in the past, purchased expired domains. The odds of your list containing anexpired domain are pretty high. And the odds of that domain belonging to a spam fighter increases with theamount of data you have.

Even though expired domain traps are extremely important to remove, return paths and protestors are theleading cause of email service provider suspensions. You do not want to let your list age, period. Withoutgetting into all of the details of why an email turns into a bounce, let it be known that bounces grow fasterthan you think. In example, 30% of emails are lost each year to normal attrition. If we divide that numberbetween 12 months, we get an average of 2.5%. Depending on your email service provider, this is a highnumber and each has their own thresholds under their policies and procedures. If you upload a list or send toit after just 30 days, you may get several warnings of either suspensions or requests to clean it up.

So in closing, which is service should you use? If your list has not been mailed to within the last 3 – 4 weeks,all you would need is verification. But if your list is older than that, you need both. Even though validationdoes a great job of removing bounces, it doesn’t remove top-level domains as explained above. You will needverification to remove those false positives.

Created by:James Carner,Owner at eHygienics.com,869 NE Wall Street, Suite 200Bend, OR 97701,USA.