What are the best third-party email validation products and strategies for registration pages?
Summary
What email marketers say13Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Reddit shares that using a disposable email blocker on registration pages significantly reduced spam sign-ups. They also mention implementing a double opt-in process to further validate email addresses.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares that they use TheChecker and accept all emails except for undeliverable and disposable ones, stating the accuracy seems to be really high.
Email marketer from Bouncer shares that Bouncer offers an email verification platform focusing on deliverability, toxicity checks, and ensuring GDPR compliance by scrubbing PII from data.
Email marketer from NeverBounce Blog explains that NeverBounce offers real-time email verification to identify invalid or risky email addresses at the point of entry, helping to prevent bad data from entering your system.
Email marketer from ZeroBounce Blog shares that ZeroBounce provides an email scoring system that predicts email engagement levels, allowing you to segment subscribers based on quality and prioritize high-value contacts.
Email marketer from EmailListValidation shares that they offer robust email cleaning services, including disposable email detection, spam trap removal, and hard bounce elimination, to help improve email deliverability and sender reputation.
Email marketer from Email Geeks advises to use such cleaning services only during contact acquisition. He states that if you want to just clean up your lists, sure, you can go to these services but, mostly you will already have everything that is bouncing marked as bounced on your lists and spam-traps, as all the smart people here mentioned, are not something they can check.
Email marketer from Email Hippo Blog explains that Email Hippo offers comprehensive email hygiene services, including syntax checks, domain validation, and spam trap detection, to ensure your email lists are clean and deliverable.
Email marketer from EmailOversight explains that EmailOversight provides email validation to determine whether an email address exists and is safe to send to, reducing bounce rates and protecting sender reputation.
Email marketer from Email Geeks mentions companies moving away from solely email validation and towards email activity to prioritize subscribers, given engagement's impact on deliverability.
Email marketer from StackOverflow explains that using a combination of client-side validation (basic format checks) and server-side validation (MX record lookup and SMTP ping) improves the accuracy of email address validation on registration forms.
Email marketer from BrightVerify notes their email validation service offers advanced syntax checks, domain health verification, and risk assessment to help businesses maintain data quality and improve email marketing performance.
Marketer from Email Geeks tested several platforms and found that Webbula's services flag more than most networks, such as ZeroBounce, Email Oversight, BriteVerify, XVerify, TheChecker, and Bouncer. They turn away flagged addresses when using these services.
What the experts say7Expert opinions
Expert from Word to the Wise advises against relying solely on validation services to avoid honeypots, emphasizing the importance of organic list building and engagement-based hygiene.
Expert from Email Geeks states I take tagged addresses (+ tagging or whatever) as a signal that the company is actually collecting email addresses rather than buying them or whatever. I generally frown on companies that prohibit them, however, the free trial cycling is one of the reasons to prohibt them.
Expert from Email Geeks claims that validation services are lying about knowing honeypots and spamtraps and says that particularly the one who is going around telling companies they have a partnership with spamhaus.
Expert from Spam Resource explains that a validation service isn't always perfect but can still be helpful, just make sure you do more than just validate an address; confirm the user owns it, and honor unsubscribe requests and bounces.
Expert from Email Geeks shares that they don't allow `+` in email addresses to combat the abuse of signing up for multiple free trials.
Expert from Email Geeks shares that they use Kickbox on two of their acquisition forms. On the prospecting/lead gen form, they only pass over addresses above a certain score to the ESP. On the purchase side, they pass over all email addresses and then if they're below a certain score, they also immediately pass over an unsubscribe.
Expert from Spam Resource notes that Email Hippo is a strong alternative to other validation services with better data and support. They also recommend BriteVerify for volume senders, and FreshAddress for list cleaning and enhancement.
What the documentation says5Technical articles
Documentation from Kickbox explains that Kickbox's real-time email verification API allows you to verify email addresses as they are entered on your registration forms, preventing invalid or disposable addresses from entering your database.
Documentation from MXToolbox explains that MX record lookups can be used to verify the existence of a mail server for a given domain. This technique helps to identify fake or invalid email addresses.
Documentation from AbstractAPI notes that their Email Validation API is a developer tool that will check if the entered email is real or fake. It can be implemented as a Javascript snippet or through your preferred backend language.
Documentation from Mailgun explains that Mailgun's Email Verification API helps improve deliverability by identifying and removing invalid, inactive, or risky email addresses before you send.
Documentation from RFC Editor details the Internet Message Format, including the formal syntax of email addresses. This specification is crucial for understanding the valid structure of email addresses for validation purposes.