Global Email 2021: More Confidence, Lower Risk

Melissa’s Global Email team is continuously striving to improve functionality related to fraud risk assessment, tracking data breaches involving emails, and our existing Deliverability Confidence Score.

Over time, email has evolved from mere electronic mail to a major part of an individual’s identity, both online and offline. Now more than ever, email verification has to take this into account. Simple syntax and domain checks are not enough when we expect email addresses to function as part of the keys to our most sensitive information – medical history, finances, etc.

Over this year, we will be introducing concept features that will provide insight into the risk factor of an email. Data such as how many times a given email has been involved in a data breach and fraud risk scores will inform email verification for all users.

For example, such features would help combat Business Email Compromise attacks, which happen to be of particular interest to the FBI. New email addresses can be a cause for suspicion, and such an attack would most likely come from a very new email address.

This is a large, multi-faceted effort, but we have already implemented some foundational parts.

Behind the scenes, we have added new logic to dynamically refine Deliverability Confidence Score using our historical data on an email. We are a data company, after all, so it is only natural that we apply our deep experience with other personal information (addresses, names, etc.) to emails. Global Email users who take advantage of Deliverability Confidence Score can now expect even more granularity without having to consider any other Global Email response fields.

For more information on Deliverability Confidence Score, see this previous release or the documentation.

We have also added a new response field, Email Age Estimated. This new field shows how far back our knowledge of a given email goes. It is intended for power users who want to implement some form of risk assessment on their own, such as favoring older (or “established”, so to speak) emails.

These additions are only the first small steps toward major future improvements that will not only give Global Email users even more confidence in our results, but empower them to make their own decisions and even pass on invaluable privacy-related information to their users.

Please reach out to your CSR or our Tech Support if you have any questions.