Got a large email db (legit) and need to verify | Hacker News Reader

Got a large email db (legit) and need to verify

2 pointsmegahz5 comments

hi, i've got a music website working for the last 10 years, i have a mailing list subscription box and now it has around 30k registrations because i had no captcha verification. I believe around 2k should be correct email addresses. Any way of verifying the email addresses and cleaning it up?

thanks

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From experience (in the past I managed a mailing list with over one million subscribers), the only good list of emails is one where everyone has done a double-opt-in, a.k.a. confirmed opt-in.

We had to do it this way, not only because it is law in many countries (and the site offered legal advice!), but because when running a mailing list that large, you need to do everything you can to run it properly: because you will inevitably run into problems with various ISPs spam traps, having double-opt-in makes it a little easier to get someone to un-ban your servers if/when the situation arises. But I digress.

I agree with a previous commenter, Piskvorr - send everyone a mail asking them to confirm their subscription.

FWIW, we didn't use captchas - we didn't see the need as we were using double-opt-in (analytics said only a tiny percentage of sign-ups on our site didn't confirm)

edit: I meant to include this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opt-in_email#Confirmed_opt-in_...

The only actual verification is to send an email saying "Hello, is there anybody out there? You gave us your address [some way], still interested?"

+ Use some attractive subject and maybe a picture in the email (optional). Just to have better chances to draw attention.

Curious what business value will be returned by purging emails. My thinking is that keeping track of 2k email addresses in a person's head is no more practical than keeping track of 30k and likewise tracking 30k in a database is no more difficult than tracking 2k.

A starting point might be including avenues of engagement in the email list such as soliciting feedback.

Good luck.

Sending thousands of emails that:

  Bounce because they aren't real.
  Land in inboxes of people who don't remember your service and therefore mark it as spam.
  Land in inboxes and are not opened.

Are all great ways to get IP banned from email providers, banned by your email sending application because you got their send IPs blacklisted or kicked out of Gmail/Outlook cloud/.me account.

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