Although many may not be aware of this, Mautic has enabled a native way make email validation part of a campaign before sending any emails to a lead. This makes your marketing list more valuable and resolves potential technical problems related to bounces.

Mautic offers a simple way to validate an email address with validation that includes the presence of the domain, the presence of mx records and even if an email address is misspelled.

Verifying if a domain exists

The most common validation method is simply to verify if the domain of the email address exists. Certain spam bots fill web forms that don't include a captcha and submit invalid emails to infect your email list and damage your reputation as well as decrease your email engagement.

Domain validation is essential for detecting invalid emails and considerably reduces the number of hard bounces in your campaigns.
Email Validation with presence of MX Records

First of all let's know what is an MX record. Wikipedia defines an MX record as:

A mail exchanger record (MX record) is a type of certified and verified resource record in the Domain Name System that specifies a mail server responsible for accepting email messages on behalf of a recipient's domain, and a preference value used to prioritize mail delivery if multiple mail servers are available. The set of MX records of a domain name specifies how email should be routed with the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).

In other words, MX records define a way to receive an email message. If a domain does not publish an mx record then it is not possible to send emails to individuals at this domain. The MX record confirms the domain has an incoming mail server configured and prevents spammers from including perceived valid email addresses but that don’t have a valid mail server, this returns a bounce if you send emails to this address.

Mautic is smart enough to verify the existence of this mx records on a domain and you can use this great feature on your campaigns.

Validate an email address inside a Mautic Campaign

Mautic offers a condition in campaigns so you can validate your contacts' email. The idea is to use this condition in your Opt-In process and you may not send an email to a contact if it is invalid. This prevents your campaign from generating a bounce in the future. Here's how to remove contacts with invalid emails in an example campaign:

In this example I made a segment that has all the new leads that have just entered my list.

Open your campaign builder and select a condition to start.

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Choose the Has valid email address condition on the select box:

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Choosing the "Has valid email address" option will apply the two validation methods we mentioned before: the existence of the domain and the existence of the MX entries and finally if the email returns positive or negative path.

If the contact has a valid email address then we apply a tag “valid email”, otherwise the negative condition erases the database contact. That way this contact will not enter into any other campaign and my email list has only valid emails.

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This campaign above applies a tag called "valid email" to the contact who will be sent through the opt-in process. This method removes invalid contacts before the first email is sent and prevents hard-bounces from occurring in the submissions. It's a great start to your campaigns.

Final thoughts

The inclusion of email validations in Mautic allows you to have more security against hard-bounces in your opt-in campaigns. Removing invalid leads before they receive any email is a great way to start the relationship with email providers like Gmail, Hotmail and others and also greatly assists your sending metrics.

Have a great Mautic Day!

This publication also has a Brazilian Portuguese version at
https://powertic.com/pt-br/blog/validacao-de-e-mails-campanhas/

Author: Luiz Eduardo de Oliveira Fonseca
Email: [email protected]