The Perils of Pinging
by Suzanne Shaughnessy
It’s a typical Monday morning phone call to us at FreshAddress. The email marketing manager — let’s call her Linda — is in distress. Her email database was having deliverability issues and she thought she came up with a magical way to fix it: she found a provider who would “ping” every email on the list and tell her if it was good or bad.
For anyone not familiar with the term, “pinging” an email list involves taking each email address that you have and essentially knocking on the door of the ISPs (e.g. Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft for Hotmail, etc.), asking if each email address you have is a valid email address of one of their customers, and then turning around and walking away without sending through your email.
“I tested it first,” she explained. “I used my own old email address and the demo told me it was invalid. The cost was minimal - you can buy pinging software for free (or for next to nothing) and do it yourself - or you can pay a nominal amount to a provider so I figured how far wrong could I go by trying this service.”
But the sad reality soon hit her Monday morning after using an outside provider. While her list was now considerably smaller, her deliverability analytics had actually gotten worse. She now was blocked by multiple major ISPs and was beginning to suspect that her emails now were being “black-holed” by others. Furthermore, when she went back to examine the email addresses the pinging provider had determined to be invalid, she found that many of these had recent opens, click-throughs, and purchases! So the pinging process had discarded many of her valuable customers without getting rid of the malicious and faulty email addresses that were causing her problems in the first place.
Myths and Legends
If email pinging could be done with reliable results, it would be every marketer’s AND SPAMMER’s dream. But with 90% or more of the messages deployed each day coming from spammers, ISPs can ill afford to allow a simple process like email pinging sabotage the tens of millions of dollars they regularly invest in their systems to keep spammers from bombarding their servers and customers.
Accordingly, the ISPs rely on spam complaint thresholds, bounce rate thresholds, and spam trap addresses to separate the legitimate marketers from the spammers. Pinging, if allowed, would prevent the use of these techniques to catch spammers and so, of course, ISPs have built their systems to stop pingers in their tracks.
If you try pinging yourself through a purchased program, the ISPs will label you as a spammer as legitimate marketers with opt-in files are not afraid of messaging their customers and donors. If you utilize an outside pinging provider, you can be sure the ISPs shut these providers down a long time ago and so any pinging results they provide will be suspect at best.
But My Provider Said They Have a “Secret Sauce”
Unfortunately, there are more than a handful of providers who see a market need (e.g. solving deliverability issues) and prey on those with insufficient time, experience, or resources to understand whether a service or product can do what it claims to do. You can buy a disk of 100 million opt-in email addresses for $99 (or an email pinging service for not much more) but hopefully by now most companies know the risks of doing so.
It only makes sense that the ISPs won’t cooperate when they notice an attempt to ping a list. Some reply with negatives for the entire list as if every email address being pinged was undeliverable. Others may offer false positives, saying that every email address is good. And some will return random responses, both positive and negative, all in an effort to keep spammers at bay.
Even worse for a marketer like Linda, the few accurate results that do come through can still cause trouble. Problematic addresses (e.g. spamtraps, screamers & squealers, disposable addresses and malicious addresses, etc.) are still going to show as deliverable. FCC wireless domains — addresses that you are forbidden by CAN-SPAM to use unless they are specifically opted-in — should also pass a ping test, even if pinging could provide reliable results.
Rely On Trusted Experts
Leslie Price of Acxiom (and formerly of email reputation experts, Return Path) stated: “Information returned via ‘email pinging’ is wrong 50% of the time, and to make matters worse, there’s no way to know which 50% is wrong. So relying on this tool would result in dropping good email addresses from your file while adding problematic email addresses.”
The Emperor Has No Clothes
We’d probably all like to believe that there’s a holy grail out there that would solve every problem, take no work to develop, and cost nothing to use. But solutions that appear too good to be true never are. Sometimes we need to let ourselves acknowledge that naked emperor walking down the street. Email pinging services, disks with hundreds of millions of opt-in email addresses of people dying to buy your products, and snake oil products that will cure your aching knees and back will not only waste your money but, moreover, leave you in worse shape than where you started.
Look Before You Leap
If you’ve got a marketing problem, seek out a trusted advisor - someone who’s been around the block, proven themselves many times over, and has your interests at heart – and ask for their help. The email industry has many knowledgeable and reputable providers who have invested millions of dollars to solve these same challenges time and time again. Just be sure you look before you leap.