Anyone have an easy way to sync invalid emails back from one of the mail checkers?
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Alpha1
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![[DBTech] DragonByte Mail](/community/data/resource_icons/5/5867.jpg?1592168386){kind=icon}
Alpha1
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I'm sure that @DragonByte Tech can elaborate on the functionality.
DragonByte Tech
Well-known member
A fair assessment, as I hate writing documentation and most of the time it's self-explanatory
As for the email validation, I'm actually testing v5.1.0 Beta 1 at the moment which removes the SMTP Email Validation feature and replacing it with external APIs. The following APIs will be supported:
- Emailable
- MailboxLayer
- MillionVerifier
- UseBouncer
I'll be releasing the beta version along with writing up a small tutorial for how to use the system, at some point this week.
DragonByte Tech
Well-known member
DragonByte Tech
Well-known member
Unfortunately I have no experience with either of those four systems, so I can't make any value or efficacy statements about either of them
I'll have to pick one for if/when I ever need to send out another mail blast, which I hopefully won't have to do since surely there won't be any more server issues now that I'm paying for cPanel again...
Alpha1
Well-known member
It would be be interesting to check the same list of at least thousands of emails against all APIs and compare the results. I'm pretty sure that the results will conflict.
I did some tests with Email List Verify some years ago and many valid addresses came out as invalid and many invalid addresses came out as valid.
Others had similar results in recent years. I would strongly advise against using them if there are better options.
I did some tests with Email List Verify some years ago and many valid addresses came out as invalid and many invalid addresses came out as valid.
Others had similar results in recent years. I would strongly advise against using them if there are better options.
DragonByte Tech
Well-known member
Sadly there are limited options available short of actually sending email regularly so you can keep bounce rates low. I try to keep the amount of useless emails to a minimum (only recently found out I had the activity summary email still enabled, entirely useless for my site!) so these kind of validations are necessary.
I do know Amazon SES are not happy about their service being used as a "live verification" system, so I'll take false positives over having to go back and beg them to unblock me for a fifth time...
I do know Amazon SES are not happy about their service being used as a "live verification" system, so I'll take false positives over having to go back and beg them to unblock me for a fifth time...
Alpha1
Well-known member
Well, Amazon blocked me already. Partly because xenforo standard email templates don't comply with their requirements and partly because bounce processing failed for some time. They will only unblock me if I proof that a number of requirements have been met. One is that I need to verify all 300k email addresses.
It's important that the verification is accurate and I don't lock out valuable members with valid addresses.
It's important that the verification is accurate and I don't lock out valuable members with valid addresses.
DragonByte Tech
Well-known member
The standard XF template in 2.3 definitely meets all the requirements, as I've not had any issues. What I did was create a notice that only shows to users with the bounced user state, so if any recurring members get flagged as bounced, they'll know as soon as they visit any page on the site.
Alpha1
Well-known member
Do Your Recipients Know Who You Are? | Amazon Web Services
When you send an email for your organization, you want your recipients to read it. For that to happen, your email needs to be delivered, and your recipients need to identify the mail as valuable and worth reading. Of course, you need to provide valuable content in the email itself, but there is...
There are some other articles that describe it
eva2000
Well-known member
Others I tested at https://github.com/centminmod/validate-emails with benchmarksThe only reason I picked the list I picked is because those were all the providers I found during a surface-level search
EDIT: Added
eva2000
Well-known member
Guess different results from my tests at https://github.com/centminmod/validate-emails
When was last time you used them?
Alpha1
Well-known member
Very nice to see your benchmark. This is really useful. Thanks!!!
Bouncify and MillionVerifier are by far the cheapest option and from your benchmark seem to give reliable results.
Its a shame that Bouncify is so slow.
EmailListVerify marked some hard bounced addresses as valid, marked quite a few soft bounced addresses invalid. It also marked some addresses from recently registered users as invalid. Upon inspection the main issue was with very soft bounces or vague status being misintepreted and marked as invalid. Another major issue I encountered was that EmailListVerify their 'unknown' status which was the result for many valid addresses.
More info here:
It doesn't work for yahoo. I have uploaded a list with 152 yahoo addresses which I knew were all bouncing. Only 9 were recognized as invalid. The rest was marked valid, which is not correct. Those yahoo addresses were inactive/deactivated. Some years back after yahoo got hacked they disabled all inactive accounts. The developer of emaillistverify are looking into the matter. I hope they can fix this.
I have not tried verifying other email...
It seems to me that the example email addresses you have used are convenient because these can be published without privacy /GDPR considerations. But these do not provide real world examples and I think real world examples are likely to give different results and expose weaknesses of the validation providers.
I think the best way to do a benchmark or to check the results for email validation services is to compare the email addresses of an active board and compare:
Compare the bounce status message from the bounce log and see in which scenario the validation service gets it wrong.
Bouncify and MillionVerifier are by far the cheapest option and from your benchmark seem to give reliable results.
Its a shame that Bouncify is so slow.
I used them in 2019. I tested about 40k email addresses and compared the results with recently hard bounced, recently soft bounced and their return message in the bounce log. @DragonByte Tech created an advanced SES bounce processing script for XF1 for me. This fetches a vast number of bounce messages (text) depending on the email server and processes these to accurate xenforo account status. I also compared the results with recently registered users, which should be valid.
EmailListVerify marked some hard bounced addresses as valid, marked quite a few soft bounced addresses invalid. It also marked some addresses from recently registered users as invalid. Upon inspection the main issue was with very soft bounces or vague status being misintepreted and marked as invalid. Another major issue I encountered was that EmailListVerify their 'unknown' status which was the result for many valid addresses.
More info here:
It works great for hotmail. I tried 40k addresses.I've only ever used emaillistverify and works nicely for vB and XF email list scrubbing
It doesn't work for yahoo. I have uploaded a list with 152 yahoo addresses which I knew were all bouncing. Only 9 were recognized as invalid. The rest was marked valid, which is not correct. Those yahoo addresses were inactive/deactivated. Some years back after yahoo got hacked they disabled all inactive accounts. The developer of emaillistverify are looking into the matter. I hope they can fix this.
I have not tried verifying other email...
It seems to me that the example email addresses you have used are convenient because these can be published without privacy /GDPR considerations. But these do not provide real world examples and I think real world examples are likely to give different results and expose weaknesses of the validation providers.
I think the best way to do a benchmark or to check the results for email validation services is to compare the email addresses of an active board and compare:
- 50 or 100 recently hard bounced email addresses from a wide variation of email providers. i.e. no more than 5 addresses per provider. These are highly likely to be invalid.
- 100 recently soft bounced email addresses from a wide variation of email providers. i.e. no more than 5 addresses per provider. These are highly likely to be valid depending upon the definition of soft bounced.
- 50 or 100 recently registered email addresses from a wide variation of email providers. These are highly likely to be valid.
Compare the bounce status message from the bounce log and see in which scenario the validation service gets it wrong.
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Alpha1
Well-known member
Something that Amazon SES support frequently alludes to is to implement this practice:
aws.amazon.com
Basically what they are saying is: monitor your sending reputation and spend some of it by sending to questionable addresses, so that slowly you process all emails. I think this is quite interesting advice that can be implemented in xenforo in different ways.
Never send to old addresses, but what if you have to? | Amazon Web Services
The best practice is to only send mail to people who have specifically asked for your mail, and who have recently interacted with your site. “Interacted” can mean different things to different people, but generally it means they have logged in to your website, they have recently done business...
Basically what they are saying is: monitor your sending reputation and spend some of it by sending to questionable addresses, so that slowly you process all emails. I think this is quite interesting advice that can be implemented in xenforo in different ways.
