Best email address verifying software

[kuau]

Does anyone have experience with email address verifying software and can recommend something? I have been googling and so far MaxProg seems to be the best choice (?).

We need to verify about 10,000 email addresses before sending, and then deal with the bounces. Is there one product that does both tasks, or do we have to purchase 2 different products?

Thanks for any help you can lend.

[djr33]

That's an interesting piece of software. It looks reasonable to me. Have you found reviews that recommend it? Just check that first to be sure it actually works, doesn't annoy your customers with test emails, etc. It claims it works well, so it's probably fine but can't hurt to check. It's also not too expensive, so if you're using this a lot, it's probably worth the price.

I'm not sure about the rest but there are MANY scripts available in PHP for managing mailing lists. They can probably automate almost everything, if you want to do this on the web. They may even be able to eliminate addresses when one bounces.


One important thing to remember is that automating all of this is not going to be perfect. You will still have some problematic emails that look normal, and maybe even are just being ignored by their owners. The only way to be positive that an email is working is to receive a reply. But in general these tools can save you time instead of going through it all manually for the more obvious cases.

[kuau]

Hi Daniel: You may recall that I was writing an email script to send a newsletter. Well, I set up cron jobs and had the whole thing working like clockwork only to discover that, not only do you have to stay below the emails per hour limit, but you also have to worry about the bounce rate because you can get your host blacklisted if the bounce rate is more than 25%. So then I had to learn how to clean up an email list without actually sending the emails. I did find a php script that would do the verification, but the host said they don't allow access to the smtp server and recommended doing it on my local computer, so ... that is why I am looking for software to verify the email addresses, and also to deal with the bounces we did receive prior to many of them getting discarded by the host. I got the distinct impression that the host did not want to be involved with the list cleanup so I have pretty much resigned myself to getting the list cleaned up locally before involving the host again.

If I have to run it on my local computer, I can't use php. The whole newsletter process was exhausting. If there is ready-made software to do this, it's worth $55 if it works well. I think I'm going to buy the MaxProg. Yikes, I just found out that aol, yahoo, msn, hotmail, and a bunch of other whole domain addresses cannot be verified! Geesh, that is a big percentage! I need to try the trial version. I'll let you know how it is. Thanks for your feedback.

[kuau]

I actually decided not to buy the address-verifying software because of the high percentage of addresses that are falsely marked as verified when they are really just skipped. The software comes with 20 domains such as @hotmail.com set in the Preference Rules as "Valid." This does nothing to reduce the number of bounces, which was the original goal.

The function of the software is not to identify spammer email accounts but rather to determine in advance if an address is valid, ie. is an existing email address that can receive mail (not bounce). Hotmail, aol, yahoo, msn etc are pre-marked as valid by the MaxPro software not because they are spammer domains but because those domains do not allow this type of checking (for various reasons). It is erroneous to mark them as valid when validity is indeterminate.

This situation is frustrating because we do not want to bother the clients by sending an email just to see if it will go through (which we would have to do manually). But we cannot use the webserver because the bounce rate would exceed 25% and would risk getting the host blacklisted and our account cancelled. Have yet to find a good solution.

[djr33]

The simple answer is to send a single automated email every time someone signs up (whenever they first provide the email address). It can be a "welcome" email or it could be a verify-by-email code if you want to confirm that way. It doesn't seem reasonable to me that for sending one email at a time (rather than a huge list at one time), and you would find out in one email per person. There's no other way to do it that I know of.

[kuau]

There are over 10,300 email addresses that were collected when clients came into the gallery and/or purchased art over the past 15+ years. The new subscriptions are not a problem. In trying to start up a newsletter after all these years, we have to clean up the existing list.

I am pretty much resigned to sending batches of emails manually every day to check contact info, thereby checking the email address. Thanks for the feedback. :)

[djr33]

Ah, I see. (You probably mentioned that before and I forgot.) Well, if new emails aren't the problem, then at least this is manageable.

That's really the only solution that I can think of, though: just slowly go through the list manually. Of course you could just get a second hosting account somewhere else and do this in an automated way-- hopefully the host wouldn't be too upset if you do it once. Since you're not really spamming, it's probably excusable. Check on the details though.

The only remaining problem is that I suppose over time there's no reason to think you woudn't end up with more people abandoning their email addresses (in the future years). So keeping track of which emails bounce every time you send an email to the list is also important so you don't run into this problem again. Have you figured out how to do that? It shouldn't be impossible, but I'm not sure on the details.

[kuau]

I did buy the MaxPro Bounce Handler Software and it does a great job. I put all the bounces into one mail folder, run the Bounce Handler software, import the output to an Access database, upload the table to the webserver, then run a php script to update the mySQL database. Very do-able.

I wish the Email Verifier worked as well... oh well. But I'll have to do the verification only once and after that handling bounces will keep the list clean. :)

[djr33]

That sounds like it will work. (It's not too efficient, but it could be worse.)

One last idea is to check if those email providers that aren't served by the software you found might have some sort of API or other method of checking if the username/email is real. For example, I found this from a quick google search:
http://my-addr.com/hotmail_email_address/email_search_hotmail/hotmail_email_finder.php

I have no idea if it works, but if it does that might help you.

[verifyemail]

Hi Kuau,

I just randomly came across your post, and I'm thinking you probably already found some sort of email address verifying software that works for you, but if not, I'd really recommend checking out our email verifying solutions at Experian Qas (qas.com). We are a leader in this field. Thanks!

[kuau]

Hi, thanks for your response. No, I did not find any solution save doing it manually in batches of 100. I went to your site but did not see any mention of validating the addresses except at the time of data entry, ie. just checking that the person typed it in correctly. That is not what I need. These addresses are already in the database.

Maybe I am missing something, but I do not have a lot of time to comb through a website. Perhaps you can please direct me where to look on your site?

Mahalo, e :)

[Stewart]

I have just been wrestling with the same problem. I have several clients with bulk mail software based on PHP and MySQL, server-side, which works well - but one of those clients, after importing a list he has been using for a while sending only plain-text mail messages using different bulkmail to legitimate customers of his, had 200 bounces out of a list of 800 - he almost got his domain shut down!

Whilst the same list seems to suffer few bounces when sending plaintext only, the new mailer sends both HTML and a Plaintext version - it seems that HTML certainly raises the alarm!

I this morning downloaded software called MailLIst Validator Ver2 free of charge and used it to check his list - Find it at:

http://www.bspdev.com/

Look for

"Mail List Validator 2.1
Free Ultimate Mailing List Vallidator"

It seems to work well and reported about 160 invalid emails. I tried two others first but they were rubbish - could not get the SMTP/Proxy to work at all!

However I do not think it handles Hotmail accounts - putting in a fake hotmail address gave the report 'Host resolved" which is maybe technically correct (there is such a host!) but I suspect there is no address like 'chajam)kkry&@hotmail.com'!

But as I have already had major problems with numerous hotmail accounts on another mail list, I have simply removed them altogether and now do not accept signups from that domain.

At least now I reckon we can send to lists which are 'mostly' clean with a much lower bounce frequency which is a step in the right direction.

I am now looking for a php script which will run a check on all mails in the DB, using a cron, perhaps daily, and automatically deal with invalid mail addresses.