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Contacts: How to Manually Validate Email Addresses.
Authored by:
on 1/30/2024 11:24:00 AM

Introduction

Email validation is an important tool to help understand whether a particular email address in your database is high risk or low risk to use in an email blast or marketing automation initiative.  For example, validation may tell you that an email address like johnny@gmeal.com is an invalid email address because of the obvious typo.  There are a few different ways to verify email addresses in the CharityEngine ecosystem.  It can be enabled globally allowing online apps like donation forms, advocacy action pages, and sign up forms to automatically verify and reject bad email addresses in real-time preventing them from ever getting into your database. 

There are manual features like the Verify/Validate email address button on the edit an email address screen and you can setup scheduled data hygiene jobs that can regularly check your email addresses for you from time to time.

Instructions

For manual verification/validation, navigate to Contacts App.  Under Organization & People, select Email. 


First, Filter using the Validation and Verification tabs for the actions you would like to perform.
You should then see a list showing only the emails you would like to see based on your filter selection

Next, click on the ellipses for options to validate/verify an individual email 



For bulk validation/verification, click on the  check box nest to the word 'Email" on the top left corner of page

lastly, click on the drop down for options to verify/validate email

Note: Be sure to read the pop-up notification for any action performed.





IMPORTANT: Email address validation is dependent upon algorithms, data and third-party systems to be as effective as possible.  However, there are many cases where there is not enough information available about a particular email at the time a validation request is made to safely identify the email address as valid or invalid.  Therefore, the state of not validated is very common and does not mean anything is wrong.  Users who are sending email blasts or setting up marketing automation processes will be offered the choice to send safely or include unverified email addresses. 

Domain Reputation Recommendation:

For marketing emails or solicitations it is never recommended to send to invalid or not verified email addresses.  Doing so can cause temporary or permanent damage to your domain reputation that is time consuming and expensive to remediate.  More importantly, less of your constituents will get your emails delivered to their inboxes.

It is okay to send emails to unverified emails for non-solicitations if your are being responsible.  Examples include scenarios where you might need to make a public service announcement and let your constituents know that an event is being canceled due to severe weather.


(example in-app email address validation UI)


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