4 ms·

If sending emails is 100% free, but you still have to worry about your sender reputation. [1] Sending a large amount of mail to invalid emails will start gettin

by welder 5y ago

If sending emails is 100% free, but you still have to worry about your sender reputation. [1] Sending a large amount of mail to invalid emails will start getting your emails put in people's spam folders. That's the reason email validation services exist, to prevent sending to invalid emails. [2] Also, humans make mistakes. You should detect spelling errors and typos then suggest corrections. [3] [1] https://www.mailjet.com/blog/news/3-factors-that-impact-your-ip-reputation/ https://www.mailjet.com/blog/news/3-factors-that-impact-your...] [2] https://www.mailgun.com/email-validation/ https://www.mailgun.com/email-validation/ [3] https://www.npmjs.com/package/mailcheck https://www.npmjs.com/package/mailcheck

mro_name 5y ago
Even if 0% free you'll have to do the opt-in anyway, or how on earth will you figure out if the recipient wants your email? It's hard to be smart with something like names.
eli 5y ago
Mickey@mouse.com is a perfectly valid address but it isn’t my address. If that matters for your application you need to spend the capital to send an email. No way around it.
- bobthecowboy 5y ago
  Even worse, I have commonfirstnamecommonlastname@gmail.com and get several emails a day that I didn't sign up for. Now the person who did sign up isn't getting them and I have to figure out how to opt out of them. Sometimes these website accounts already have payment/personal details associated with them, which I now have access to (and indeed, sometimes have to view) in order to find the "stop sending me email" button. Always send the confirmation "did you sign up?" email. Always.
jdhawk 5y ago
So you use another 3rd party validation service, paying $300-500/million addresses.
deckard1 5y ago
This is really just a problem for spammers going out and either buying mailing lists that haven't been validated or scraping the web for email addresses. In the case of the spammer, they would probably care a lot more about their bounce rate than their false negative rate (i.e. valid addresses that fail some sort of validation regex). In fact, they would probably tune their validation to actually throw away addresses that didn't look correct just to be safe. Obviously, this is a different scenario than your bank not accepting your valid (per RFC) email address. Which is why any sort of blanket advice is pretty dumb. Not that I care to aid spammers... The other scenario might be a site that puts up a "paywall" type thing, where you are forced to enter an email address to gain quick access to something, but doesn't want to bother you with going and verifying an email (e.g. instant discounts, downloading a PDF, etc.). Or in-person email address collection when you buy something in a store. It's never a good idea to collect email addresses of people that have no desire to subscribe to your marketing.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Yeah, buying a dataset of a couple of million email addresses and then using them to email people who didn't sign up or request your email isn't really something I care to optimize. It wouldn't shock me at all if the services that charge to validate emails are just doing a half-ass regex and leeching off spammers anyway.
Avamander 5y ago
Oh don't worry about this at all because spammers are going to sign up with legitimate e-mail addresses that are going to get your reputation lowered. Very common tactic and you won't be saved by some dumb regex that would just probably hurt a few real users.
- welder 5y ago
  Two separate things: preventing fake account sign ups vs. preventing legit signup typos In practice, you build your UI for the latter. You add captchas or other friction for the former.
cratermoon 5y ago
Yet those tools are full of bugs as well as culturally blind and prudish assumptions. Hint: try signing up with the address null@null.com - https://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/your-last-name-contains-invalid.html https://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/your-last-name-contains-invalid... - https://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validate-an-email-address-until-i.aspx/ https://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validat... - https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/email_address_quiz/ https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/email_address_quiz/

by welder 5y ago

mro_name 5y ago

Even if 0% free you'll have to do the opt-in anyway, or how on earth will you figure out if the recipient wants your email? It's hard to be smart with something like names.

eli 5y ago

Mickey@mouse.com is a perfectly valid address but it isn’t my address. If that matters for your application you need to spend the capital to send an email. No way around it.

bobthecowboy 5y ago
Even worse, I have commonfirstnamecommonlastname@gmail.com and get several emails a day that I didn't sign up for. Now the person who did sign up isn't getting them and I have to figure out how to opt out of them. Sometimes these website accounts already have payment/personal details associated with them, which I now have access to (and indeed, sometimes have to view) in order to find the "stop sending me email" button. Always send the confirmation "did you sign up?" email. Always.

jdhawk 5y ago

So you use another 3rd party validation service, paying $300-500/million addresses.

deckard1 5y ago

This is really just a problem for spammers going out and either buying mailing lists that haven't been validated or scraping the web for email addresses. In the case of the spammer, they would probably care a lot more about their bounce rate than their false negative rate (i.e. valid addresses that fail some sort of validation regex). In fact, they would probably tune their validation to actually throw away addresses that didn't look correct just to be safe. Obviously, this is a different scenario than your bank not accepting your valid (per RFC) email address. Which is why any sort of blanket advice is pretty dumb. Not that I care to aid spammers... The other scenario might be a site that puts up a "paywall" type thing, where you are forced to enter an email address to gain quick access to something, but doesn't want to bother you with going and verifying an email (e.g. instant discounts, downloading a PDF, etc.). Or in-person email address collection when you buy something in a store. It's never a good idea to collect email addresses of people that have no desire to subscribe to your marketing.

cratermoon 5y ago
Yeah, buying a dataset of a couple of million email addresses and then using them to email people who didn't sign up or request your email isn't really something I care to optimize. It wouldn't shock me at all if the services that charge to validate emails are just doing a half-ass regex and leeching off spammers anyway.

Avamander 5y ago

Oh don't worry about this at all because spammers are going to sign up with legitimate e-mail addresses that are going to get your reputation lowered. Very common tactic and you won't be saved by some dumb regex that would just probably hurt a few real users.

welder 5y ago
Two separate things: preventing fake account sign ups vs. preventing legit signup typos In practice, you build your UI for the latter. You add captchas or other friction for the former.

cratermoon 5y ago

Yet those tools are full of bugs as well as culturally blind and prudish assumptions. Hint: try signing up with the address null@null.com - https://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/your-last-name-contains-invalid.html https://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/your-last-name-contains-invalid... - https://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validate-an-email-address-until-i.aspx/ https://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validat... - https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/email_address_quiz/ https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/email_address_quiz/