Email Verification and Validation – What’s the Difference?

Many email marketers will argue there is no difference between email validation and verification, but in reality, they are two different things. If you are in marketing and sales, you must have heard about how an email list works wonders for your lead generation efforts. When you have an up-to-date list, you can send emails to your subscribers and engage them with targeted marketing campaigns.

Verification is a necessary maintenance step for any large email sender. Most of the large email senders combine validation directly into their intake processes and landing forms. A majority of email service providers will send to each email address on your list, whether it’s bad or not. Then they will alter the status of the subscribers depending on the bounce code received.

An email service provider’s deliverability means that the recipient server has got the email. Even if it bounces, they will send it repeatedly, based on the bounce code. However, sending numerous emails to email addresses that bounce them can severely impact your overall email deliverability. Poor lists drive most of your emails to the spam folder rather than the inbox, even if the recipient is valid.

Email Validation

The journey to obtain email addresses starts with the typing process. Most emails will have various symbols like &,*,$,#,?/. Now envision some of your clientele trying to type some of these symbols in a hurry. The room for mistakes is large. Email validation tools help in capturing some of these honest email typing mistakes. 

Here, punctuation is everything and it’s more than just a domain with a period in it or an @ symbol. Email addresses can have several symbols in the name (before the @) like a-z, A-Z, 0-9, !, #, $, %, &, ‘, *, +, -, /, =, ?, ^, _, `, “, {, }, |, ~ (without the commas).

A period is expected after the @, but not at the end or the beginning. There are a few email validation services that verify to see if a mail record exists for the domain or not. It is an essential check just to find out if the email address can be routed. However, it has more to do with the recipient than the domain it’s being sent to.

Email Verification

Email verification is a more intricate process as it involves determining if the email address is active or exists. Tools are used for checking if there is an actual recipient on the other end. During the process, the email inbox account is checked for activity—verification checks for invalid, valid, and unknown emails.

The most intricate part of email cleansing is email verification. It is the process of confirming if the recipient account’s mailbox exists, is active and accepts emails. All this requires much work, like algorithmic, programmatic, and historical databases, which the emails can be checked against. It doesn’t matter if the email address is valid as the account exists and accepts emails.

• Whether or not the email address is invalid and it will not accept emails because it is inactive and the account does not exist. 
• Whether or not the email address is duplicate as it is uploaded within the same list.
• Whether or not the email address is a catchall email address. This address is commonly used in small businesses to ensure that the company receives an email sent to them, regardless of typos in it. They are valid but often not safe.
• Whether or not the email address is unknown, they can’t definitively verify this email’s status. This email might appear to be ok; however, the server and/or domain aren’t responding to the verification requests. This can be due to an issue with the expired domain names or their internal network.

Here are a few benefits of email verification and validation

• It keeps your sales team productive by marketing to legitimate recipients.
• It reduces your bounce rates
• It keeps you off the radar for spamming.
• It saves the time of your marketing team by eradicating selling to invalid email addresses.

Do you find these pointers useful or need to discuss in-depth email verification, validation, or other authentication processes to understand the impact of implementation in your email marketing campaigns? 
Our email marketing experts can walk you through how you can implement various email authentication processes that will improve email deliverability and response rates significantly. You can initiate the discussion/consultation via our Contact Us page or by dropping a “Hi” or “Hello” at info@marrinadecisions.com or via messaging us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn – So, let’s start talking!