Partner Insights
In this issue we return to our “Partner Insights” series. Your roving reporter had an opportunity to sit down (over email, of course) with a leading email industry expert and ask a question of interest to our readers. As part of our continuing series of “Partner Insights”, we hope it will continue to provide you with answers to some of your most vexing issues.
Our panelist this month is Leslie Price, Product Manager at Acxiom.
FreshPerspectives: Leslie, “email pinging" is a network utility that attempts to perform a real-time check (without actually sending an email) to see if a mail server is available at a specific domain and, if so, if the user exists at that domain. We’ve heard some email providers offer "email pinging" as a way to validate an email address. Is this a responsible practice and something that you would recommend?
Leslie: If a client is hoping that performing an “email ping” will create confidence in the actual deliverability of an email address, it’s simply not possible. 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.
Further, email pinging can also subject you to being blocked and blacklisted by ISPs. Companies that build permission based lists deploy with regularity to their list and remove invalid records, so they have no need to test an email address before deploying to their subscribers. ISPs can tell if you are pinging to presumably clean your list and therefore this action can potentially impact the deliverability of your entire email program. Since the primary methods ISPs use to catch spammers is by tracking bounce rates, spam complaints, and the existence of spamtraps, it only makes sense that they’d be smart enough not to allow people to ping an email address without sending an actual email.
Finally, spamtrap and honeypot addresses are deliverable as are DMA “do not email” blocks, habitual complainers, and role accounts (e.g. abuse @, info@, etc.) so email pinging, even if there was an ISP that did allow this, would not solve the problem of a dirty list. At Acxiom we never recommend pinging mail servers for the reasons above as well as other more technical reasons for why the information you receive back is inaccurate.
There are much more reliable services out there, such as FreshAddress’s Real-time Email Address Correction Technology (REACT) that can provide a more accurate response in terms of validating and correcting an email address within milliseconds. The only way to ensure the deliverability of an email address is to send an email to that email address.
Thanks so much, Leslie, for sharing your insights on this subject. We’ll “talk” again next month!