Melissa Data In the News



Melissa Data’s Email Object Verifies Email Addresses

New component in Data Quality Suite corrects and standardizes email addresses to insure efficient delivery.

Consider it your data quality firewall. The Data Quality Suite from Melissa Data, a provider of data hygiene software, databases, developer tools, Web services, data enhancement services and mailing lists, serves to ensure that all of the major contact points of information that a company has with its customers--name, address, telephone number--have been checked, verified, and if need be, corrected and standardized.

And as email has grown in importance as a means of customer communication, so has the need to apply the same concepts to email addresses. “As a data marketing company, we have been doing a lot of our own email campaigns,” said Bud Walker, a Melissa Data product manager. “And we would run into a number of issues.” Messages would be bounced. Instead of .com the address would have a .con at the end. Sometimes there would be two @ signs. “There was no validation whatsoever on the domain,” Walker said. The domain is the part of the email address that comes after the @ sign.
Addressing the Problem

Faced with this problem, Melissa Data saw the need for a solution that would help improve the quality of the addresses used in their email marketing campaigns. “We felt that if it filled a need for us, it could fill a need for others as well,” Walker said. The idea was to develop a simple tool that could cleanse email addresses used in marketing campaigns and could also be integrated into Web sites and used to verify email addresses at the point of entry.

Using those criteria, Melissa Data decided to develop an email verification solution. Email Object is the result.

“We have a huge database of several hundred thousand contacts,” Walker said. “We have 70,000 unique look-ups per day.” The company was able to analyze its data and identify the major problems with email addresses and created a series of steps to address those issues.

Levels of Validation
The first level of validation is a syntax check. Should they desire, enterprises can remove or fix all the email addresses that are incorrectly constructed. For example, sometimes people will enter hash marks, percentage signs, or double periods. The address is legitimate but there are errors in the syntax. Email Object can strip out the incorrect symbols.

The next step is to check the domain name itself. Because Melissa Data maintains an extensive database of more than 125,000 working domain names, it can compare an incoming address with its existing database and verify that the domain is valid.
For the third level of validation, Email Object will check Internet Mail Exchanger (MX) records. MX records resolve an SMTP mail server’s IP address. “It verifies that the mail server exists, and we mark the address as valid,” Walker said.

Other Features
Additional Email Object features include a customization file in which enterprises can specify spellings. For example, Yaho could be set equal to Yahoo and addresses with Yahoo misspelled can be corrected immediately. Also, domains are sometimes updated. For example, @home.com became Cox.net. With Email Object, those addresses can be automatically updated.

Moreover, companies can add their own lists of valid domain names or suppress certain domain names to which the enterprise does not want to send mail. Finally, the solution will standardize email addresses as either upper or lower case.

Operation
The Email Object is a standard API. It has input properties, functions that can be called, and a set of output properties, in which email addresses are parsed into their different components. Each is assigned a status code designating the certain confidence level that the address is correct.

The Email Object can be incorporated into applications that support Web-based guest books, call center applications or other processes that request and collect email addresses. Each address can be assessed and verified when it is entered. Companies that maintain large email address lists can also use Email Object in batch mode to identify problematic entries. “It can be used anywhere you want to clean up email addresses,” Walker said, and can run either on the enterprise’s server or be called as a service from the Melissa Data servers.

Advantages
No other solution combines the Email Object’s range of functionality and simplicity. “It is a very low-cost solution that everyone can implement,” Walker said. Enterprises don’t have to develop rules for their Web sites and it’s cross-platform functionality allows it to work with any Windows or Unix system. It can run anywhere and be implemented within a couple of hours. Using the Melissa Data database it can review several million addresses an hour. Updated databases are provided every two months on a subscription basis.

Over time, email verification and validation should emerge as a standard element of any data quality program. “I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t try to check you email addresses. If they are worth capturing at all, you should check them,” Walker said.

Pull Quote: Checking email addresses should become a standard element of any data quality program.