How to deal with fake emails

[nsoria1]

Hi team, hope you are doing well.

Which is the best approach to deal with bad data in regards to emailing? Is there any Marketo feature we can use to identify and delete dummy emails? Such as asspda@osijd.com.

From my side I investigated and found that we should export leads, validate dns from email provider and then hit the API to delete those but not sure if it is the best appraoch.

Thanks.

[Michael_Florin]

Hello!

I assume asspda@osijd.com is an example of an email address that doesn't exist, right? Because the domain doesn't exist or the alias doesn't exist. Well, a wise person here once said: The best way for Marketo to find out if an email address is valid or not, is to send an email to this address. When Marketo fails to send that email, it will mark it as Email Invalid = true, and then never try again. And you are supposed to monitor this scenario and take action accordingly, e.g. delete that record.

[nsoria1]

Thanks @Michael_Florin for the reply!

Yes, is an example of the email we have in our Marketo leads database but we know it is not a valid email.

Thanks for sharing that strategy with me, I think it will be ok to identify invalid emails. Deletion can happen with a batch campaign later right?

On the other hand, that would involve sending email to leads and if the email delivery is ok (meaning it exists) will work for our stakeholders as it will be considered a test to validate existence of the email address.

I am wondering if validating the provider will be the only way to check if an email is valid without sending an email to the email address.

[Amod_Kumar_Shar]

I think this is the best way to make the email invalid, even it will exist in database but never qualify, and of course it's better to delete from the database.

[SanfordWhiteman]

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I think this is the best way to make the email invalid, even it will exist in database but never qualify, and of course it's better to delete from the database.

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Not sure what you’re referring to?

[AjayS · Accepted solution]

Hi, @nsoria1 

One possible way to strengthen the database hygiene is to use an email verification tool such as QuickEmailVerification. This software can help you verify the validity and deliverability of the email addresses that your leads provide on your forms post submission or gets enter as a list import. It can also help you detect and remove bots, spam traps, disposable emails, role accounts, and other invalid or risky emails from your list. There are many competitor products available if you don't want to use QuickEmailVerification. These tools can easily get integrated with Marketo. You can send Webhooks to validate the email address.

[AjayS · Accepted solution]

One possible way to strengthen the database hygiene is to use an email verification tool such as QuickEmailVerification. This software can help you verify the validity and deliverability of the email addresses that your leads provide on your forms post submission or gets enter as a list import. It can also help you detect and remove bots, spam traps, disposable emails, role accounts, and other invalid or risky emails from your list. There are many competitor products available if you don't want to use QuickEmailVerification. These tools can easily get integrated with Marketo. You can send Webhooks to validate the email address.

[nsoria1]

Hi @AjayS thanks a lot.

I think this will be a viable approach to implement without sending an email to that recipient as well.

Thanks.

[SanfordWhiteman]

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These tools can easily get integrated with Marketo. You can send Webhooks to validate the email address.

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“Easily” seems a bit of an exaggeration when you consider my point 1. above, but yes, if you rely exclusively on webhooks they are all easy.

[SanfordWhiteman]

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From my side I investigated and found that we should export leads, validate dns from email provider and then hit the API to delete those but not sure if it is the best appraoch.

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“Validate DNS” is part of email validation but is certainly not sufficient.

DNS can tell you if a domain has an MX record and could, in theory, receive mail. That’s as far as it can go. Your particular example of osijd.com happens to not have an MX record. But if you were trying to type something “random” then you might well have typed osijo.com, which does.

It’s cheap (in terms of resources) to look up millions of MX records. Any email validation process has do that step first anyway. But the next step is connecting to the MX and starting (but not finishing) an email send. That’s the part that’s costly and relatively complex and why 3rd-party services specialize in this.

The best approach is 4-pronged:

1. Integrate real-time verification with Marketo forms so people who enter typos (and aren’t malicious), and those who are malicious but not particularly skilled, can’t even submit the form if the address can’t receive mail. This will not catch those skilled enough to bypass JS validation, although adding reCAPTCHA will further limit the chance of bad stuff getting in if the submitter is human.

2. Call a webhook after every form submit (or for other one-by-one lead creation processes) that asks the same validation service to do a lookup. This will catch anybody who maliciously sneaked around the JS validation.

3. Upload all your lists to the service and do bulk validation before uploading to Marketo.

4. Run a daily batch for people who haven’t been revalidated in N days and pass them through the webhook.