Global Intelligence

A Quick Overview on Email Validation Benefits and Challenges

Written by Melissa Team | Jul 12, 2024 4:00:00 PM

An email list is one of the most important things a marketer or business can have when it comes to digital marketing. While social media is beholden to algorithms, and web banners and promotions can be blocked with ad blockers, an email list is a surefire way to get your products and messages in front of the people who are genuinely interested to hear from you. 

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the challenges and benefits that come with keeping an email list clean!

One of the biggest challenges of email validation is the lack of a universally accepted syntax. While there are general guidelines in place, email service providers can allow an email address to look unorthodox—some even allow emojis! This makes it hard to parse out what a valid email is from an invalid email.

Another challenge is typos and errors in a domain name. Some of these can be easy to fix: for example, misspelling gmail.com as gmial.com is easy to identify as a typo. But other domain names could look similar to domains that you’re used to seeing. You want to make sure that you’re not missing out on valid email addresses by fixing a typo that actually isn’t a typo. 

It’s important to make sure that you have a clean email list to protect your sender reputation. An email sender reputation is the number that an email service provider uses to determine whether your email will end up in the inbox, the spam folder, or blacklisted. Making sure that you don’t send emails to invalid email addresses, spam trap emails, mobile domains, or disposable domains when sending marketing messages will help you keep your sender reputation up.

Melissa’s Email Verification can help you keep your email list clean. It will identify common syntax errors, and has a database of well-known and historic domain names, so we’re only returning high confidence corrections. It will also help you maintain CAN-SPAM compliance and give you a deliverability confidence score, and more!

To hear more about email lists, deliverability, and protecting your sender reputation, check out Melissa’s 10 minute microwebinar on Global Email Verification, hosted by SD Times, featuring Pouya Tavakoli, a software engineer from Melissa.

This microwebinar is part of a five part series - make sure to check out the next one on Global Name Verification on July 18! 

Learn more about Melissa’s Email Verification solution on our website, or call 1-800-MELISSA. Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog for everything related to data quality!