Since email list cleaning and validation is a big part of our business and a service Email Answers offers, as you might imagine, we see a whole bunch of email data and occasionally have some interesting surprises when validating it.

Poof Goes the EmailThis week, a customer sent us about 300,000 email records. After we cleaned and verified the list, it was cut down by over 70%, which was the first clue that there was a problem. Typically, when validating a good opt-in email list, the usual loss is between 3% and 10%. This often indicates two things: the list is likely very old, and it may have been purchased. This highlights why you should never waste your time or money on buying an email list.

After sending the list back to the customer, he discovered an ESP that enabled him to run an email campaign to the list, but the results were poor. Even though he was only allowed to test 10,000 of the contacts, the outcomes were expected given the age and type of the list. Out of the 10,000 emails sent, he recorded 54 opens, leading to an open rate of 0.54%. What’s intriguing is that most of the emails were delivered, but to whom? That’s the key question.

We then dug a little deeper into the list. We found a large percentage of emails were from @Bigfoot.com. In the early years of the Internet, (starting circa 1995), Bigfoot provided an email forwarding service, which most of us thought had vanished with the Dot-Com Bubble Burst of 2000. The interesting fact is that they still, to this day, provide this forwarding service. So the email account you had with Bigfoot in 1997 is still forwarding email to the other email account you haven’t had since 2001.

Hold on a minute, it gets better.

When Bigfoot accepts email and then forwards it on to the email it was setup to forward to, even if it doesn’t exist, Bigfoot never responds and informs the sender that the email is invalid or bounced. Sort of like a big black hole that exists at Yahoo on occasion.

Are you totally confused yet?

Since part of our email validation process involves connecting to the email server, of the email address being tested, to see if it will accept email, without ever sending an email to the end user, this makes it much more difficult and virtually impossible for the “final destination email” to be validated.

Let me attempt to confuse simplify this for you.

If [email protected] accepts every single email sent to it and forwards it to [email protected], but [email protected] is a non-existent email address or is no longer valid, and [email protected] never replies telling you that [email protected] isn’t a valid email, how are you supposed to know? Better yet, since [email protected] is valid and accepts email, we have to mark this email as valid, even though it is not valid, because it accepts email.

Now you know how a “Valid and Deliverable Email is Neither Valid nor Deliverable”.