As seen on Performance Marketing Insider
What is the difference between email validation and email verification?
The email list hygiene industry has metamorphosed into two categories. Email validation and email verification. I have written several articles about the two separately on my blog, but I think it’s important to explain both processes in one article so you can choose which is right for you if you are an email marketer.
Email validation concentrates on external threats and some return paths (bounces). Validation finds and removes spamtraps, protestors, syntax errors, unicode characters, misspelled domains, incorrect strings, invalid and/or unlikely email characters, departments, erroneous mx, flawed domain setups and does IP threat matching to removal. Validation does verification to some degree but cannot validate top-level domains like Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Hotmail and the like (free email service providers).
Verification focuses all of its efforts on the return path itself, which can be a bounce address (hard or soft), an envelope from, envelope sender address, mail from or return address. In other words, when a sender executes a message, the recipient server could send a return response. In example: the mailbox is full, unavailable (such as not found), blocked, bad command, exceeded storage, failed transaction, syntax error, counter argument, requested action not taken and/or insufficient system storage or out of office reply just to name a few. There are dozens of return paths and in my next article I will list and explain all of them.
