Validation
- Ongage OngageConnect
- Noam Rotem
- Shay Dank
Intro
What is email validation
Email address validation is the process of verifying whether an email address is valid and deliverable. Various methods are used to check if the email address exists, is properly formatted, and can receive emails.
Sending emails to invalid, non-existent or no-longer-in-use email addresses, will result in high bounce rates, damage sender reputation, and the increased risk of being flagged as spam.
To avoid such issues, email address validation, use advanced email address checking technologies and algorithms to verify the validity and deliverability of a set of email addresses, helping email marketers to increase their email deliverability, sender reputation and performance.
Ongage’s built-in email validation service
The services is available directly from the UI of the Ongage platform enabling marketers to validate all contacts in a selected segment or their entire list.
Improve your email marketing results by cleaning your email list with our built-in email validation service. Remove bounces, spam complaints, spam traps, and bots from your list. Our email validation service will help you reach your customers and boost your open and click rates, while ensuring that your emails are delivered to real, engaged recipients.
This feature is accessible to Ongage Admins and General Users only.
Note: that this service incurs an additional cost. To use the service, you will need to first purchase credits. Each credit allows you to verify one email address. Therefore, one should avoid verifying the same email address multiple times, as each verification attempt will consume one credit.
Ongage Validation How To
How to issue a new validation
(1) First you’ll need to purchase validation credits. For that, please reach out to Ongage Support.
(2) Go To Validation→Overview. There on that main dashboard you’ll see how many credits you have left and how many email validations you’ve used so far. Click on the New Validation button.
(3) Choose to either validate your entire list or a given segment in your list. Provide a name to this validation. Optionally choose to validate emails Optionally choose to receive a notification email once the validation is ready. Then click on the VALIDATE button.
(4) After clicking on that Validate button the following validation confirmation pop-up dialog box should appear. Make sure you have enough credits to validate the list or segment, and click on the START VALIDATION button to start the validation process.
Following the confirmation you’ll get the following validating notification pop-up dialog box
Upon closing the latter window, you’ll be taken back to the main Validation Dashboard where you’ll see your validation in Status Queued. Once completed the Status will change to Completed.
How long is the validation process
The validation process may take a few hours, although it is often completed sooner.
Therefore it is recommended to get organized with your validation at least several hours ahead of when you’ll need to use it.
How to view validation results
(1) From the Validation dashboard, hover over the 3 vertical dots menu (on the right side of the screen) and click on the download icon.
(2) You’ll get a zip file with a name like this: “ev-request-28-results.csv.gz” (where the number 28 is the validation ID as it appears in the Dashboard above). Open the Zip to extract the CSV results file which looks as following:
Validation results explained
Email Results can be one of the following values:
Deliverable
Unknown
Risky
Undeliverable
Email Validation Reasons are as following:
accepted_email - Email address was accepted
low_deliverability - Email address appears to be deliverable, but deliverability cannot be guaranteed (in most cases it is caused by catch_all / accept_all configuration of recipient’s server or full mailbox)
low_quality - Email address has quality issues that may make it a risky or low-value address (in most cases it is caused by the fact that it is a disposable/temporary email)
invalid_email - Specified email is not a valid email address syntax
invalid_domain - Domain for email does not exist or has no DNS records
rejected_email - Email address was rejected by the SMTP server, email address does not exist
dns_error - We were unable to resolve DNS records or domain is misconfigured
no_connect - Could not connect to SMTP server
unavailable_smtp - SMTP server was unavailable to process our request
unknown - An unexpected error has occurred
How to segment based on validation
Two new validation system fields have been added to the segment criteria – Email Validation Result and Email Validation Update Date that users can use for segmenting.
When selecting the ‘Email Validation Result’ system field, it contains the following predefined values:
Best practice is to only send to Deliverable, and certainly when warming up a new sending domain and/or IP. So you can create an include Segment of Deliverable ONLY. Or you can create an Exclude Segment where the Email Validation Result is Unknown, Risky and Undeliverable, and make it a default exclude Segment.
Moreover, it's recommended to put all the non-deliverable email addresses into a Global Suppression list (see our Lists Management help page, for more info there about Suppression Lists). Alternatively, you can change the status of those email addresses marked as ‘Undeliverable’ as well as ‘Risky’ to Hard Bounce. See the ‘Change Status/Delete’ operation under our Contacts Manager for information on how to do that.
Validation FAQ
How to see how many contacts have been validated
In order to help you track how many and which contacts have been validated so far – you can create a segment using the following Segment criterion:
Any contact that has ever been validated will have a Validation Update Date, so creating a segment based on that criterion will produce a segment of all contacts ever validated.
Are validations propagated to emails on other Lists
Yes. When you do a validation in one list, and if any of the emails validated also exist on another list in your account, then they too will be validated. Use the criterion in the previous FAQ above to find all validated contacts in each list.
Is there a Validation API
Yes there is. See our Validation API documentation.
When collecting new email addresses from an online form, or landing page, best practice is to use the Validation API, on each incoming email, and then only add the deliverable ones to your Ongage sending list.
In addition, if needed for your business use-case, you can add the non deliverable emails to an Ongage Suppression List.
Stated Accuracy of Validations Results
Following is the stated accuracy of each Validation result status:
Deliverable status: 99% accuracy for most of the ISP providers (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook).
Undeliverable status: 99.9%+ accuracy. Our solution is biased against false negatives.
Risky status: 99.9% accuracy.