How to use email validation to fight spam:
Table of Contents
Introduction
If you’re an email marketer, you’ve probably had it with spam. According to many sources, more than half of all emails sent in 2019 were spam—a big increase from 2018. And if your inbox is anything like mine, that number is only going to keep rising.
So how do we fight back? How do we stop our emails from ending up in junk folders and making us look like spammers? The answer is simple: You can use email validation.
Bot-generated emails
While some spam emails are sent by humans, most spam is generated by the software. This means that you may see the same message pop up in multiple places, or it might be accompanied by misspelled words and poor grammar. Bot-generated emails often include links to malicious websites or other forms of phishing.
To help separate the wheat from the chaff, many companies use email validation tools to check that an email is legitimate before they accept it into their inboxes. These tools analyze incoming messages and make sure they meet certain criteria: they’re formatted correctly (no attachments), they don’t contain suspicious links or unsolicited content, and so on.
Expired domains
An expired domain is a red flag: It’s often used by spammers to register their email accounts.
By the time you get an email from someone using an expired domain, you probably won’t have much context for your relationship with that person. So it’s important to pay extra attention when you see one of these emails in your inbox—and even more so if it doesn’t come from anyone you know or recognize as a legitimate sender (like an organization you might have recently donated to).
A quick way to check whether or not someone has been using an expired domain is with Whois Lookup tools, which can be found online. These tools let you search for information about specific domains and their respective owners. If the owner of a given email address was previously associated with an expired domain, chances are good that this person is not legitimate, either because they were hacked or because they don’t care enough about how they appear online (or both).
Syntax errors
Syntax errors are the most common coding mistake in spam emails. Some email filters will catch these, but not all of them.
Syntax errors can be simple or complex and may require manual intervention or software support. For example, an email might use a wrong punctuation mark or misplace a comma in a long list of recipients’ addresses. Other syntax problems are more difficult to fix because they involve HTML code that is too complex for most people to understand (e.g., CSS). Fixing these kinds of advanced technical issues can make your emails less likely to be marked as spam by some filters, but it’s not enough on its own: You still need to follow basic rules when writing your message so that the overall tone makes sense and doesn’t appear too generic or robotic–which looks like spam in itself!
Invalid mail exchanger (MX) records
An MX record is a type of DNS record that designates a mail server responsible for accepting email messages on behalf of the domain. MX records are required for sending and receiving emails. They must be correct and valid in order to receive mail from other domains (email servers).
If there is an invalid MX record, you will not receive an email from the domain with which it corresponds.
Blocked IP addresses
There are many benefits to using IP addresses. First, they’re unique. Every computer has its own IP address, so you can use them to identify a specific device on the internet. Second, ISPs assign them. Your ISP assigns you an IP address when they connect your home or business to the Internet. Third, they are blacklisted by ISPs when someone is suspected of spamming or engaging in malicious activity online—and if enough people report suspicious activity from an IP address, this could get them blacklisted by an ISP.
So how do email providers use this information? To stop spam! They look at incoming emails and try to determine whether or not each one was sent from a valid mail server that belongs to a legitimate company (like Google) or if it was sent from an unknown source because it didn’t originate from any mail servers that were known beforehand as being legitimate ones belonging only those companies which had previously been identified as ones having good reputations for sending out legitimate messages through email servers belonging exclusively only unto themselves–I mean…you know what I mean right?
Invalid mail servers
One of the most important things to know about email validation is that it can be used to help fight spam. Spam usually comes from invalid email servers, so knowing how to spot them can help you avoid being scammed.
Blacklisted domains or IP addresses
If you receive an email from a domain or IP address that has been blacklisted by one of the many DNSBLs, you can be sure it’s spam. Here are some of the most popular ones:
- dnsbl-check.com
- dnsbl.iip.lu
- dnsbl.sorbs.net
- dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net
You can fight spam with email validation
From the moment you start using your email address to receive messages, you’ll likely see a flood of spam. And while some people might just ignore these pesky emails entirely and delete them, there are plenty of reasons why you shouldn’t do this.
For starters, spam is often used to spread phishing scams and malware. By deleting these messages without reading them first (or even reporting them), you’re missing out on an opportunity to spot these harmful threats before they can cause real problems for your computer or smartphone.
It may also be possible that a friend or family member was trying to reach out via email but couldn’t because their message wasn’t getting through due to an unknown reason—and if the message was important enough for them to try again later down the road when perhaps it would’ve been too late!
So don’t take chances: learn how effective validation services like Gmail’s “Block Sender” feature can help solve this problem once and for all!
Conclusion
Email validation tool is an effective way to fight spam and boost your email deliverability. It can help you reduce the amount of spam in your inbox by identifying emails that have been sent by bots, or ones that contain blacklisted domains or IP addresses. It’s also helpful in detecting syntax errors like non-delivery reports (NDRs), which are generated when an email cannot be delivered for one reason or another.
