Nick Hristov, Product Manager
Email
Validation and Correction Guru
In this issue we profile Nick Hristov, Product Manager extraordinaire here
at FreshAddress.
Nick is responsible for new product development and continuing
enhancements to our real-time and automated batch services.
FreshPerspectives (FP): I understand you're originally from Bulgaria?
Nick: I was born in Varna, on
the coast of Bulgaria.
It's actually the second largest city in the country. But by far, first in
terms of beauty!
FP: How did you come to land at FreshAddress?
Nick: I started as an intern at FreshAddress while I was getting my
Masters in Information Technology at Clark
University. After I graduated,
FreshAddress offered me a full time position, and I've been here ever since.
FP: What sorts of innovations and special projects have you
been working on for the company?
Nick: My biggest focus has been our Real-Time
Email Address Correction Technology (REACT) product. It's an email address
validation and correction tool, a.k.a. our “spellcheck for email” on steroids.
REACT detects and blocks suspect
and invalid email addresses – and it’s the only solution on the market, to our
knowledge, that offers suggested corrections for hygiene errors, all in a
matter of milliseconds.
Using a few lines of code, we can
integrate into customer websites, CRM platforms, POS devices, and virtually any
web-enabled system.
FP: Do you have a favorite example of a typo or error REACT would
catch?
Nick: My favorite might be jsmith@yahoodotcom.
Amazingly, that’s not as rare as you’d think! Especially when people are taking
emails over the phone at a call center. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg
– REACT catches lots of different types of errors – far too many to list here.
FP: Is REACT a hosted or cloud-based service?
Nick: It’s cloud-based. When we moved it from a hosted service to
cloud-based, it allowed us to improve performance by an order of magnitude. We
now have request-to-response interactions as quick as 5 milliseconds. From a
customer perspective, it’s virtually instantaneous.
Moving to the cloud also increased
our throughput volumes, simplified load balancing, and allowed us to scale the
product significantly.
FP: Can REACT detect spamtraps and
honeypots?
Nick: Yes – that’s one of the big advantages of REACT compared with
competing products on the market. Our competitors’ validation services usually
involve “pinging” – essentially checking the existence of a mailserver and/or a
specific user at a given domain, without actually sending an email. Pinging can
result in a number of both false positives and false negatives, but its real
downfall is that pinging does nothing to identify spamtraps, malicious
addresses, or spam complaint-prone addresses. These are all deliverable
addresses.
What makes REACT so powerful is
that it catches and blocks spamtrap and honeypot addresses in real-time, at the
point of registration, before they even enter your customer database.
FP: Spamtraps and honeypots are blocked with REACT. What else is
filtered out?
Nick: It can also detect dead domains, working domains with faulty
or lacking MX records, DMA “Do Not Email” addresses, FCC Wireless Domain
blocks, suspect and malicious addresses, known bounces, email addresses that
register significant spam complaints, disposable email addresses, and hygiene
errors that we can usually correct.
FP: How do clients integrate REACT into their websites?
Nick: REACT is platform-independent and can be integrated
seamlessly in any system. My personal favorite is via the overlay plug-in available
on our demo site. It literally involves a simple four-step process (essentially
copy and paste of four lines of code). Clients can start using the service
almost immediately on any website or platform. Furthermore, the overlay concept
is the least intrusive in terms of page design and helps avoid site real estate
issues.
FP: What else do you have in the works?
Nick: Most of the projects I’m developing are confidential until
they’re launched, but I can tell you that we're working on more automated and
real-time services to not only make it easier for clients to get the data they
need as quickly as possible but also to provide them with even more valuable
information about the specific email addresses we’re touching.
FP: I hear you ride a motorcycle?
Nick: I do. I'm trying to decide where to store it right now as the
winter roads in Boston
are not particularly conducive for motorcycles. I recently moved to an
apartment in Harvard Square,
and I have a huge, largely unfurnished living room which seemed like the
perfect spot.
FP: In the living room?
Nick: It would make a great love seat as well as a beautiful piece
of artwork. But I hit the wall. Literally, I couldn't fit it through the doorway,
even with 4 guys helping.
FP: So there's no motorcycle sofa in your future?
Nick: I'm going to find a way. Maybe I'll take it apart and
reassemble it inside.
FP: Wouldn't that classify your apartment as a garage?
Nick: In the movie “The
Tower Heist,” Alan Alda’s character has Steve McQueen’s Ferrari in his
penthouse suite, so I figured having a red
Ducati in my apartment should be OK.