![]() Using lots of domains and lots of IP addresses - like spammers do! - and not properly identifying your company in whois, PTR, SPF, DMARC and other network records is the mark of someone sneaking around. Your reputation is easier to build and stronger when it is based on a single domain and a single IP address, or a small and contiguous range of IP addresses. You need to properly identify your company, including your domain and your IP addresses. What are some things you should consider? So, let's say that despite all the problems and objections to email verification as a business model, you decide to offer such a service. ![]() (They need to remove bounces, non-responders and bad list segments and imports, and then do a permission pass over the remaining addresses, keeping only those whose owners subscribe to that offer.) Email verification services must operate with a strong policy which prohibits listwashing, trap washing and related spam support services, and which avoids clients who seek those services.Ĭonsiderations if attempting to offer a verification service These services might be of marginal help for point-of-sale typo'd addresses (but it won't catch many typo traps, despite tricks the verifiers use to detect those) or in the few edge cases of list owners who have not been as diligent as they should in address acquisition and list maintenance, but many of those cases need to take much stronger list hygiene measures than simply verifying the existence of addresses. They do not help list owners who have done proper opt-in acquisition and list maintenance, nor do they help mail receivers (including both Postmasters and mailbox owners) who rely on spamtrap data to keep spam off their servers and out of their mailboxes. Listwashing and spamtrap washing services help spammers. Sending high volumes of verification probes without an attempt to actually send an email will often trigger filters or firewalls, thus invalidating the data and impairing future verification accuracy. Doing verification against systems that have disabled those functions, whether successful or not, constitutes an attempted breach of the receiver's security policies and may be considered a hostile act by site administrators. That should give a clear indication to email verifiers about the opinion of Postmasters of the service they intend to offer. In fact, since about 1999 or before, all mail servers are installed with those off by default. Nearly every Postmaster (mail server administrator) on the Internet has turned off VRFY and EXPN due to abuse by spammers trying to harvest addresses, as well as a general security and privacy measure required by most network's operational policies. While those two functions are technically different, they both reveal to a third party whether email addresses exist in the server's userbase. SMTP includes commands called "VRFY" and "EXPN" which do exactly what verification services offer. ![]() That means that transactional mail like receipts, tickets or vouchers could be sent to the wrong person, yet the address won't bounce because it was verified to exist. It does nothing to verify the permission of the recipient to accept a subscription, which is the most important step in avoiding spam when acquiring addresses for bulk emailing lists, nor does it ensure that the email address owner is the same as the person making the transaction. That helps avoid undeliverable messages which can trigger spam-blocking actions by the receiving system. The idea of the verification service is to determine whether an email address exists, before it is used for transactional or bulk email. We have met them in industry social circles, sometimes they get tangled in our lists, and often we're asked by senders and receivers alike: "what does Spamhaus think of verification services?" Over the past several years we have encountered several businesses offering email verification services. The Spamhaus Project view of these services Wordpress compromises: What's beyond the URL? SERVICE UPDATE | Spamhaus DNSBL users who query via Cloudflare DNS need to make changes to email set-up Poor sending practices trigger a tidal wave of informational listings Tweet Follow the dubious merits of email verification services
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