Author Archive
Where did cgommer@cox.net go?
Email Validation
Contributed by Geoff Grow
19% of email addresses provided in free offers are bogus.
I recently did a study for a client who had a large number of email addresses that they collected on their free-sweepstakes form. Entrants were asked to enter their name and their email address for a chance to win a daily prize valued at $1,000. On the entry form the marketer did basic JavaScript validation tests on each address entered by the user and this naturally kept out a lot of improperly formatted e-mail address from being written to their database. However, the marketer did not do an outbound verification e-mail to their customer to confirm the accuracy of the email address that was entered by the entrant nor did they do use a real-time email address checker to verify the email addresses.
Service Objects has a corporate client that gave us approximately 120,000 email addresses from various campaigns and on various dates in 2011. Each address was processed through our email validation service. Each address was checked for syntax, domain-level validity and mailbox-level validity; additional checks for vulgar and bogus addresses were also performed.
At first glance the addresses looked OK. They were properly formatted and their domains (right side of the address) mostly belonged to the top e-mail providers like gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and others. However using email validation tools, we determined that 18.7% (22,700 out of 120,000) had mailbox level errors. These email addresses are undeliverable because the mailbox element (the left-side of the address) is no longer a valid working mailbox.
An example of one of these addresses is: cgommer@cox.net. The address has good syntax, a working MX record, a valid SMTP server but the mailbox element (cgommer) is invalid according to cox.net. Perhaps this entrant made up this address? Perhaps she moved ISPs? There is really no way for us to know with 100% accuracy. This was a bad address and should have been marked in their database as so.
Why valid email addresses matter: Marketers who look to re-connect with clients need valid working addresses. Email service providers like Constant Contact and MailChimp have rules in which they seek a maximum allowed bounce-back rate of only 5%*. If your bounce-rate is too high (>5%) you will be banned from mailing with their service. They do this to weed-out poor quality lists and to reduce load on their mail servers.
What you do about it: Marketers seeking to improve their email address quality should take the following actions:
(1) use JavaScript based email validation
(2) use a hosted email validation tool
(like those we offer at www.serviceobjects.com)
(3) send a confirmation email to verify users identity
(4) should periodically re-validate the list prior to any bulk mail campaign
*http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/about-bounce-warnings/
- Email Validation
How Social is Your Name?
The Most Popular Names in Social Networks
What’s the most “social” name in the networks? It may not be what you think it is because of many factors, the first being that many popular social networks operate using Roman (Latin) character sets. So, a surname like Chang may weigh low on the list because it has many Roman equivalents: Chang, Zhang, Chong, Cheung, Cheong, Chong, Jang.
Name validators are no better at distinguishing between the variances in pronunciations and spellings in names that have been converted from non-Roman alphabets. So when you’re entering client data, be sure that someone with the name George Li isn’t really George Lee; or Debbie Whang isn’t really Debbie Wang.
I’ve researched the top last names, based on data collected from 140 Million social network users worldwide. Here’s a list of the top 50, arranged from the highest frequency rate to the lowest. How social is your last name? Do you see it in the list?
|
|
Posted by: Geoff G.
CASS Certification Explained Over Dinner
Last night I was having dinner with my wife’s friends and they asked what I did for a living. Normally I just brush those requests off and say ‘Internet Security’ or ‘Contact Validation’ and change the subject. But last night I said, “Service Objects validates contacts – we validate customers names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses for our clients.” I thought that was that; but the discussion lingered With questions like: How is that done? Can anyone validate addresses? Do you have an agreement with the Post Office? It was rather a lively discussion so I thought I’d rehash the highlights here.
In the United States the Postal Service promotes good address hygiene through its Coding Accuracy Support Systems (CASS) initiative. It is in the best interest of the postal service to receive mail with valid, genuine, and accurate addresses. The less incorrectly addressed mail they get, the more efficient they become and the less waste for mailers; everybody wins. The CASS certification program is open to mailers, service bureaus, and software vendors that have lots of addresses and want to get discounts on their mailings. To receive mailing discounts and be “certified”, participants in the CASS program must renew their certification annually. Every year, the requirements for being a certified address provider get more difficult. For example: In August of 2007, the USPS required CASS participants to include delivery point validation (DPV) to verify whether or not an address is deliverable at the street/house/apartment level.
CASS certification is the ultimate take-home test. The CASS certification test contains 150,000 bad addresses, extracted from real-world cases everywhere the postal service delivers, plus a few non-existent addresses thrown in for good fun. Test takers (like us) must evaluate and correct each address by fixing the ZIP code, the street address, the unit type, the bar code digits, etcetera. To be approved as a CASS certified vendor you must score above 98.5%; this means you can only miss 2,250 addresses in total. A passing grade is an A+ (geez).
Although the USPS CASS program requires a mere 98.5% passing rate, real-world accuracy for address standardization is much higher. Why? For the purpose of rigorous testing, the USPS skews the CASS test towards unrealistic conditions, intentionally populating the test with 150,000 of the worst addresses you will ever see. Given normal conditions, real-world accuracy of a CASS certified provider exceeds 99.99%. In my decade of experience with address validation, I have seen only a small handful of real address we couldn’t validate.
No sleep for the us though, the next set of 150,000 addresses for 2011 should be here at any time. I think my wife’s friends learned more about address validation than they ever wanted to know. I’m not sure I’ll get invited to dinner with them again any time soon. Well, they asked for it!
Posted by: Geoff G.
Facebook Email Addresses: A Boon for Email Validation Systems
Recently, Facebook announced a new email service that allows Facebook users to seamlessly integrate personalized Facebook e-mail accounts with their Facebook profiles. This “social inbox” concept links together SMS, IM, and e-mail into a single platform. The product provides you with an @facebook.com e-mail address that links to your profile. For instance, my Facebook account is: http://www.facebook.com/geoffrey.grow, so my Facebook email would be geoffrey.grow@facebook.com
This will be a boon for e-mail validation, in that the new Facebook messaging features will allow validators (like us) to link Facebook e-mail addresses to Facebook accounts. Pseudo-anonymous e-mail addresses (like pilot23@gmail.com) have always been a challenge to businesses; linking Facebook email addresses to profiles will aid in weeding-out unrelated contacts and fraudulent transactions. Linking together e-mail, Facebook accounts, SMS, and the contact, in other words, linking together the channels, will improve visibility into online transactions, and is a win-win for all parties (except the bad guys).
Posted by: Geoff G.
