When talking about email validation you might get confused or lost with the jargons being used by different providers. It is vital to understand these terms so that you get the right picture of the capabilities of the different vendors. We have made best efforts to explain some of the most common terms related to email validation within this blog.

Email Validation Industry – Comprehensive Glossary

API (Application Programming Interface)

API in layman terms is a bridge that allows your application to connect to a third-party application. Every request that your application makes through this API for a specific set of data is called an API call which is usually the measure used to charge you for the API service. Antideo provides an email validation API for the users to validate emails in real time and has a good amount of documentation available on the website for easy integration.

IP Blacklists

There are a number of public repositories that house the IP’s of known offenders gathered through a number of sources. It is helpful to check the IP’s of your prospects against these blacklists to prevent fraud way before it happens and avoid your team chasing leads that would never result in a sale. You can read more about the blacklists at Antispam Blacklists

Email Bounce

An email is said to have bounced when it cannot be delivered to a recipient, this could simply be because the recipient email address does not exist, or the recipient email server rejects the email due to other reasons. There are primarily two types of email bounces; Hard Email Bounce and Soft Email Bounce. You can read more about email bounces at Soft and Hard Bounces.

Disposable Emails

This refers to email addresses that exist for a few minutes to a few hours, and post that cease to exist. Disposable emails also go by names like Temporary Emails, Temp Emails, Throwaway Emails or simply DEA. You can read more about how disposable emails affect you as a website owner at What is a disposable email?

Email Validation and Email Verification

Email Validation is often mixed up with email verification, but both are very different from each other. Validation is more centered around checking the syntax or in layman terms the format of the email, and ancillary things like disposable email check, blacklist check etc.
Email Verification on the other hand is about verifying that the email address exists by sending a mock email but stopping at the recipient’s email server to ensure the email address exists. In this process the recipient never receives an email.

MX Record (Mail Exchanger Record)

It is a record within the Domain Name System (DNS) that has a big part in delivering your emails. This record points out the mail server responsible for accepting emails on behalf of the domain. Checking for the MX Records is the first step towards ensuring the email address exists.

Role Based Emails

This refers to a position or a function or a group of people based email address within a company, when you are selling B2B it is ideal to push the prospect to enter their individual email address for better visibility instead of accepting role based emails tagged with info@, support@, sales@, hello@ etc.

Greylisting

It is a filtering method employed by the email server to protect it’s users from spam by temporarily rejecting emails from an unfamiliar sender and asking the sender to try again later in a few minutes.

Generic Email Addresses and Business Email Addresses

Generic email addresses are email addresses from providers like Gmail,Yahoo,AOL,Hotmail etc that anyone can get easily for free. Business emails on the other hand are associated with the business domains that is usually very specific to the company or institution that owns it. This information is useful especially when selling B2B to identify the interest person as well as the intent to engage.

Are there more terms you would like us to include? Just drop us a comment here and we can take it up.