Contact Checker Pro - product update

As many of you will be aware, we are working on a new product that validates email addresses in "bulk". Here is a quick update on where we are with this.

Progress

We've opted to offer this new service as a server based solution. This means that you simply upload your emails, we do the work and send you the results. This approach has many advantages including:

• No software for you do download, install and maintain
• Far more accurate validation results (see my previous post)

Server software

We currently have the core validation service completed and it runs sweet! In tests, we are able to validate thousands of email addresses per hour. Our server software is multi-thread and multi-server capable meaning that we can scale out to ensure that performance is not affected by demand.

We currently have the capability to validate campaigns / lists of several hundred thousand addresses.

Client / user interface

We also have the core of a basic user interface in place. From this interface, customers can manage their bulk validations. Here is what we have at the moment:

• Import emails to the system using copy/paste.
• Contact list that can be filtered by validation status ("Good", "Bad", "Blocked").
• Ability to export results to CSV, Word, Excel and PDF.
• The capability to email directly from the user interface using our rich text capable editor.

Offering

We are now putting the product proposition and pricing in place.

The product will be available on a one-off and a subscription model giving customers total flexibility on how to use the product in their business.

We'll be offering free trials together with low cost monthly plans to help businesses budgets in this tough economic climate.

We'll also be changing our pricing model for Contact Checker Pro (WebService) from annual to monthly.

Email address validation - are desktop validators worth the money?

Does your business use email to keep in touch with your customers?

If the answer is yes, you have probably already experienced the problems that arise from customers who don't have valid or current email boxes. Does the following sound familiar?

• Bounced emails or Non Delivery Receipts (NDR's)
• Having to manually update your customer newsletter list with every NDR from every newsletter or campaign

Desktop email validation

You might have considered using one of the many desktop products available for bulk email validation.

Perhaps you are thinking of purchasing one of these desktop products. If so, stop!

We have found these products simply can't provide accurate results.

The big problem with desktop software

Why are there issues? It's not any problem to do with the software itself but rather where it is being run from.

Checking email addresses for validation requires a 2 way "conversation" between the mail box you are checking and the software you are using to do the checking.

The problem comes when the server hosting the email box that you are checking. Due to the problems of spam, many email boxes use various methods to check for spam-like SMTP "conversations".

Your desktop email validation software will simply NOT work if:

• You are running it on a desktop with a dynamic IP assigned by your internet provider
• You do not have a reverse DNS entry for your IP
• You do not have valid DNS/SPF records for the IP running your desktop validation software.

We have found that the following large email providers do not support email validation from desktop software:

• Microsoft Live
• Gmail
• AOL

There are many others that we could cite but just these results alone should raise questions as to whether desktop email validators are worth the money.

Contact Checker Pro - the difference

We believe that the only way of doing email address checking with acceptable accuracy is using a server (service) based solution.

Contact Checker Pro (our server based email checker) is currently available as an XML web service and can be integrated into almost any software that you currently run.

Our new bulk email validation service will launch this spring and will allow unprecedented accuracy of validation for large lists of email addresses. We'll keep you posted!