Posts filed under ‘Email Validation’
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.
Does Email Validation Help Catch Bogus Email Addresses?
A lot of people ask what an email validation system really does and if it really helps catch bogus email addresses.
The short answer is, it weeds out good email addresses from bad. However, all email validation systems are not created equal. Some help and others don’t.
A standard method is to use server-side scripting on Web forms to verify that emails are input correctly; it’s easy to defeat this method though by simply typing in anything@whatever.com.
With a standard email validation system, this example passes muster because it has a name, an @-sign and a TLD (Top Level Domain. Ex. .com, .org, .net): Not so with an instant, advanced email validation Web Service. If you’re in e-commerce, or any business that’s dependent upon correct email information, you’ll need more than server-side scripts to weed out bogus email addresses.
An advanced email validation Web service uses tricky algorithms to quickly identify bad information within email addresses. Think of an email validation Web service as an online x-ray device that sees through an email address’ basic structure to identify shortcomings that are not obvious by mere observation.
While standard email validation falls short in identifying bogus email addresses, advanced email validation goes the extra mile and does a pretty thorough job. An email validation Web service checks for things like: does the domain really exist? If it does, does it have rules for allowable domain names? Can it contain numbers, vulgar terms? Does the mailbox even exist within that domain? What about the SMTP server?
- Read Six Things Every Email Validation System Should Do in Service Objects’ Hot Topics, How Does Advanced Email Validation Web Services Work and How Do They Compare to Standard Email Validation Scripts?
- Check out DOTS Email Validation Web Service. Use the online demo or sign up for a free 15-day trial.
October 26, 2010 at 10:34 am serviceobjects2001 Leave a comment
