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 could be impacted, which can cause a bad sender reputation. Consequently, your messages end up in the spam folder or are blocked by Mailbox Providers before reaching the recipient’s inbox. 

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

If SMTP requests cannot be completed, UNKNOWN is returned. Unknown emails are also 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 can 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, go 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. The supported file formats (up to 15 MB in size) are:

• .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 is shown in the last columns, as displayed in the following table.

Domain example	Valid mailbox	Valid syntax	Disposable	Role-based	Catch-all	Detailed reasons	Risk
valid.domain@ gmail.com   Mailbox is valid and will receive email.	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Detailed reasons not returned	Low
help@ infobip.com   Mailbox is valid but role based (not suitable for sending).	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	role_address	Medium
dummy@ mailinator.com   Mailbox is valid but not suitable for sending since it's disposable.	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	disposable_address	Medium
syntax_not_valid@ gmail.com   Syntax is not valid, do not send.	No	No	No	No	No	invalid_syntax	High
address.not.valid@ gmail.com   Mailbox is not valid, do not send.	No	Yes	No	No	No	invalid_mailbox	High
unknown@ gmail.com   Mailbox may or may not be valid, the SMTP server of recipient is not allowing check.	Unknown	Yes	No	No	No	unavailable	Unknown
catch.all@ yahoo.com   Mailbox is valid but has the catch-all configuration and cannot be verified (not suitable for sending)	Unknown	Yes	No	No	Yes	catch_all_domain	Unknown

Validation over API

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