Email Validators and How They Work!
A powerful tool that helps ensure that the communication initiated by an organization via email reaches the target client. The purpose of the process is to verify whether an email id is reachable or not. Email Validation finds extensive use in Email Marketing. Several companies, big or small, use email marketing as the primary mode of reaching out to potential customers. These emails are sent in bulk and cannot be manually checked or verified, and are taken care of by email validation systems in a much more efficient manner.
Listed below are a few checks that almost every email checker does and should verify in order to validate an email address:
1. Syntax Verification: an email id comprises three attributes namely the username, the domain name, and the “@” symbol.
2. Validating the DNS: This again is done by checking some pre-defined DNS industry rules that are meant to be kept in mind for a healthy DNS setup.
3. Checking the SMTP Connection: Verify the existence of an SMTP connection using telnet.
4. Verifying the email for inappropriate, vague, or suspicious names.
5. Detecting incorrectly spelled domain in order to avoid Typosquatting.
6. Testing for Catch-All emails.
The above checks depending on which and how many of these does an email pass, categorize emails into the following categories:
1. Accept-all/Catch-all Email Address: An email address that directs all the emails sent to a particular domain name, to itself. No matter what is the username/prefix of the email id, if it belongs to that particular domain, it will be caught by the catch-all email. For example: if “all@email.com” is a catch-all email address, all emails of the domain name “email.com” will be considered an alias to “all@email.com” and all the emails sent to those addresses will be caught by “all@email.com”.
2. Valid Email Address: An email that upon the above checks proves to be reachable and safe to reach will be categorized as valid. The sender can send these accounts the emails in full confidence.
3. Invalid Email Address: An email that fails to pass the above checks will be categorized as not valid and must be discarded.
4. Unreachable Email Address: An email address is claimed to be unreachable if the connection to the SMTP server does not exist or cannot be accessed.
These are a few categories that make sending emails to potential customers and discarding spam or invalid email ids faster and more efficient.
If you are looking to design your own email validator, here are some details and tips that might help you.
- When it comes to making a system, the first step and foremost step is to figure out the functional requirements. A few of the essential functional requirements for an email validation system are:
1. Consumer Access through the web application.
2. Access to data to be entered into the system.
3. Consumer access to the response/report generated upon the analysis
4. Backend management via web. - It is a good idea to list down the concepts that will be influencing your system. Essentially, for an email validation system, you should make sure that you are comfortable with the following:
1. Regex: regular expressions help in checking the emails syntactically.
2. DNS: a domain name server, simply put, is a nickname given to an IP address so that it can be easily remembered and is much more readable.
3. SMTP servers: a simple mile transfer protocol server is one that takes the decision of where a sent email is supposed to go, i.e, what server is the said email directed towards.
4. Types of emails: you should have a clear idea of what categories can emails be segregated into. I have mentioned a few categories in this blog as well.
5. Networking: A basic knowledge of computer networks will benefit you as it will help you understand the core of how the routing is working, what connections are being made, etc.
Here are the links to a few pre-existing email validation systems that you might like to explore:
1. BytePlant: https://www.address-validator.net/
2. ZeroBounce: https://www.zerobounce.net/email-validation-api.html
3. Mailgun: https://www.mailgun.com/email-validation/email-validator/
Hope you liked this blog on Email Validation Systems and got some help out of it. Thank you for reading!
