Blog, Deliverability

How to clean our database of invalid emails

3 April 2017 Comments Off on Cómo limpiar nuestra base de datos de emails inválidos

One of the main problems that any email marketer will have had to deal with at some point, has to do with the consequences of sending an emailing to a database with a high number of wrong addresses. The main consequence of sending to these addresses is a high bounce rate (bounces), which directly affects the sender reputation and may, depending on the shipping platform, result in the shipment being stopped.
As a reference, the lower the bounce rate, the better, and it should never approach 2%, the threshold at which we can have serious reputational problems.
If we detect that the bounce rate If the number of emails you send is too high, you can resort to email validation solutions. These are tools that check the validity of the emails in our database. Once the database has been passed through these solutions, we will obtain three files, one with the valid emails (the address represents a real email address and there is a real address on that domain), another with the invalid emails (that address is not real or there is no real address in that email) and a third one with the emails for which the valid/invalid verification could not be carried out.
We recommend, if the problems you are experiencing are significant, to include dubious addresses in the invalid email group to minimise risk.
Depending on the size of the database, the validation process can take more or less time. For reference, the last time we validated a file of 60,000 records, it took around 12 hours to return the results.

The main classifications of invalid emails that these solutions return after analysing our database are:

  • Incorrect format: for example (jordi@**@*************se.es)
  • No replies: no*****@*****io.com
  • Bounces: hard bounces because this email does not exist
  • Bad MX/Domainthe domain is invalid and does not resolve correctly.
  • Spam-trapsspam: these are booby-trapped emails that are published by email service providers such as Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail, on websites such as forums and blogs in order to detect spammers who pick them up to send unsolicited mailings.

There are different suppliers, we have tried Uproc with good results.