Review: validate your email addresses with Atomic Email Verifier

The people at Mass Mail Software are sponsoring this post about one of their products: the Atomic Email Verifier.

The Atomic Email Verifier (AMV from here on) is an installable application with the sole purpose of taking lists of emails and making sure they are all valid. AMV can hook into another of their products - the Atomic Mail Hunter - which trawls the Internet looking for email addresses.

Getting your list into AMV
The best thing about AMV is the number of different ways you can import you email addresses. You can import them as text, CSV, Microsoft Excel documents, Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft Access databases and Database DBF files. That really satisfies most user needs I imagine.

The test data I chose to use
I chose to export a list of Email subscribers from Zookoda (who used to manage my Email subscriptions). I chose to do this for a few reasons: fortunately it accidentily broadcasted a newsletter to my subscriber list which meant that inactive email addresses were removed from the list. This means that the list I'm using is 100% verified. Every address on this list is valid and working - so AMV should return 100% on every address I give it, right? I don't use Zookoda anymore but because it accidentily sent out an email the other day it means the subscriber list is still up to date.

3 stage validation
AMV does 3 different validation tests. It tests the email syntax (whether it looks right and matches the format an email address should be), whether the domain exists and then whether the mailbox exists.

Stage 1 - works
Stage 1 does work, but it's easy as hell to validate an email address by syntax. You can do it in any programming language using regular expressions - I've done it dozens of times. If you're interested you can click here to find out how.

Stage 2 and 3 go wrong, badly wrong. The humanity.
As I mentioned before, my test list is a list of subscribers that I have confirmed. Each of the emails on the list is valid (or at least 97-99%) because not a single address bounces. This means I could test to see whether AMV correctly identifies these as valid. So I imported my list and this happened:

A list of 43 valid subscribers didn't do so well in AMV. In fact only 7 were identified as valid, which is worrying.

The most worrying thing of all is that I'M NOT VALID
That's right kids, my own address was deemed not valid. Friends of mine who are also 100% valid were rejected too. In fact almost everyone who used Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo were rejected - which is unfortunate considering they're the three biggest providers. So a few people were let through but most weren't. What good is an application that thinks I'm not real?

The problem lies in testing mailboxes
The ability to connect to a mailbox doesn't determine the validity of an email address - vendors like Hotmail and Gmail don't let random IP's probe mailboxes without authentication. Therefore when the server tells you to **** off AMV decides that means the mailbox doesn't exist. Therefore 90% of the world's email addresses would probably get flagged as invalid.

Should you want this software

You can obtain a free 30 day trial from massmailsoftware.com/verify or you can opt to purchase the full version for $39.85. You can even use the code "MMS-SEOPHER-10" to get 10% off, although I seriously wouldn't recommend doing so. MassMailSoftware need to look at how this application works before I could ever recommend it. Hell, it rejected 36 of my 43 subscribers which I know are valid!

Imagine the damage this software could do if you actually believed the output? If I had a mailing list of 10,000 people and it rejected 9,735 of them and I believed that, imagine the cost to my business? Until they rectify this I'd avoid it at all costs.

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