Wow, what did the CampaignMonitor folks eat? "Verifying emails is an email marketing best practice": guys, CONTEXT, please. Dropping catchy headlines like bombs is not making you any good. Then quoting someone about real-time verification in a part about "List decay" either his a badly orchestrated communication stunt, or pure stupidity.
> There *are* valid times to *validate* an email address in that manner Yes, yes and yes. The only moment email validation is ok is real-time at the collection. I've seen, to prevent typo domains, auto-completion or dropdown lists, first with most common domain names, then narrowing down to known domain names based on what the user it typing. No need to connect to anything to validate, here. Then, to validate that the address is the right one, and that you're adding in your database the email address of the owner of the email address: confirmed opt-in. It's as simple as that. No need to think any further. To me the list-validators are dark grey hats. Their real-time service can be legit. The rest, I don't see how. -- Benjamin Billon -----Original Message----- From: mailop [mailto:mailop-boun...@mailop.org] On Behalf Of Stefano Bagnara Sent: Wednesday, 7 March, 2018 17:13 To: mailop <mailop@mailop.org> Subject: Re: [mailop] Hat color of list washers / validators On 2 March 2018 at 21:45, John Johnstone <jjohnstone-mai...@tridentusa.com> wrote: > [...] > It seems somebody gave some fairly purposeful thought into coming up > with the algorithms to generate these. I'm curious to know what > peoples thinking is as to the hat color of these attempts. > Particularly if there are any opinions on the risk / need to block them. Tools like hunter.io try to suggest you the "pattern" used by a company so that you can guess email address for named people, but they mainly use crawled data, so I think your suspect is findanyemail.net: put a name and surname and your domain and it will try to guess the patterns and "verify" them. That said, about the hat color.... We're a small ESP and I think email validators/cleaners are making OUR life harder. We can identify bad clients/customers as soon as they load their list if it contains very old expired domains, spamtraps, fake domains, emails like "e...@ail.jpg" or some .pdf TLD. Or we can identify "non confirmed" lists because of the presence of many typos domains. This let us block and vet the senders BEFORE they abuse our tool (and send spam). But if they come with a cleaned list then it is harder for us and we have to do the first send in order to understand they are spammer, and sometimes when they have mostly b2b addresses it is hard because of missing FBLs from the providers and very low feedback from recipients that know it is spam. I think that from a receiving MTA point of view, this is the same: if they hit your spamtraps (or simply invalid recipients) you have more chance to deal with them "correctly" and early. So, from our point of view, bulk list validators are bad and I can't see a valid point to use them, but trying to trick the game (for short term spamming results). That said, some ESP have a different opinion from me, as I just read this recent post: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2018/03/verifying-emails-win-win-email-marketing/ I'm interested in how receivers see this email verification tools and how many of them deployed protections from them (e.g: identify their IPs and refuse or fake the answers to their requests or anything else). Stefano PS: between the many email verification tools, Kickbox (https://kickbox.com/about) have a claim "Kickbox is a white hat service provider". _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
