Validation

An essential part of sending targeted emails is to ensure you have a clean list of engaged subscribers. Email validation acts as the first line of defense ensuring accuracy for both your new and existing email lists. 

Sending emails to invalid addresses incurs unnecessary costs and affects the overall success of your email campaigns. 

By targeting invalid email addresses, your sending reputation will be impacted, which can cause a bad sender reputation. Consequently, your messages end up in the spam folder or end up blocked by email service providers (ESPs) before reaching the recipient’s inbox. 

The Infobip email validation solution validates in real-time with ESPs if emails are in fact valid and exist (YES), or whether the email is invalid or not found (NO). This solution is also available as a standalone service if you do not need the full email solution.

If SMTP requests could not be completed, UNKNOWN is returned. Unknown emails will also be returned if the targeted mailbox provider does not support the mailbox verification. 

It is recommended that once emails have been validated, only addresses with the following output values are kept: 

• Valid mailbox = YES 
• Valid syntax = YES 
• Disposable = NO 
• Role-based = NO 
• Catch-all = NO 

As well as checking email validity, Infobip also carries out some additional checks to emails.

Syntax 

Misspelling domains is a common error made by senders, and consequently emails are not sent to invalid domains (e.g. “@gmail.com” can easily become “@gmial.com”). 

Infobip email validation returns those invalid email addresses and suggest potential valid alternatives instead. 

Recipient Roles 

Identifier role-based emails, such as “help@”, are associated with a company, department, or a group of recipients instead of a real person. The goal is to get your email delivered to real people for your content to be read.  

Infobip email validation identifies such addresses and you can remove them from your list, so they don’t trigger high bounce rates and spam complaints. 

Disposable Domains 

Disposable emails are temporary addresses known to be used by spammers. Sending emails to such addresses will cause your emails to land in spam folders and won’t generate enough opens and clicks. 

Infobip email validation identifies such addresses and you can remove them from your list, so they don’t trigger high bounce rates in the future after being put out of use. 

Catch-All Detection 

Some mail servers are configured to accept all emails sent to the domain, regardless if the specified mailbox exists. This setup was used to avoid losing important emails sent to a specific domain. Nowadays this is becoming a problematic setup as it presents an easy way for spammers to send unsolicited emails to such domains. 

Infobip email validation cannot confirm that an email address is valid for catch-all domains but can detect the catch-all configuration and return it as the result of the validation. 

Validation in Broadcast

To begin validating emails, follow the instructions below:

1. Log in to the Infobip web interface, navigate to Moments > CREATE BROADCAST and then select Validation as your channel.

2. To create your list, you can type it manually in the To field, add a list from the People module, or import a local file from your desktop.

Supported file formats (up to 15 MB in size):

• .CSV

• .TXT

• .XLSX

• .ZIP

3. Name your broadcast, click ANALYZE and then click LAUNCH to validate the emails.

4. The Analyze summary shows the total amount of addresses to be validated and the cost estimation. Once email validation is completed, you can view the report in the Analyze section under Detailed reports.

Go to Analyze > REPORTS > CREATE REPORT, choose Detail and select Email Validation. 

The validation report settings allow you to create a report per each campaign name (broadcast), validation period, or other parameters using the Advanced option when creating the report.

The validation output will be shown in the last five columns as displayed below:

Domain Example	Valid Mailbox	Valid Syntax	Disposable	Role-Based	Catch-All	Comment
valid.domain@ gmail.com	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Mailbox is valid and will receive email.
help@ infobip.com	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	Mailbox is valid but role based (not suitable for sending).
dummy@ mailnator.com	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Mailbox is valid but not suitable for sending since it's disposable.
syntax_not_valid@ gmail.com	No	No	No	No	No	Syntax is not valid, do not send.
address.not.valid@ gmail.com	No	Yes	No	No	No	Mailbox is not valid, do not send.
unknown@ gmail.com	Unknown	Yes	No	No	No	Mailbox may or may not be valid, the SMTP server of recipient is not allowing check.
catch.all@ yahoo.com	Uknown	Yes	No	No	Yes	Mailbox is valid but has the catch-all configuration and cannot be verified (not suitable for sending)

Validation over API

To see how to validate email using the Infobip API, see Validate email addresses on the Infobip API Developers Hub.