Frequently Asked Questions

Here are the answers to some of the questions we've received from prospective clients about our service. If you have a question and it is not answered below, please feel free to contact us.

Q. We're considering using your service but we're concerned about the confidentiality of our lists.

A. We've been offering list-related services since 1998. During this time, we have been entrusted with several thousand lists of 500,000 subscribers or more, never mind tens of thousands of smaller lists. We have probably already been exposed to at least 75% of the addresses on your list through one of our other clients. Many Fortune 1000 companies use our services - not just for cleaning, but for hosting their email broadcasts. Our reputation in the industry is so much more valuable than what any single list could be worth to us. We would be more than happy to sign and return a nondisclosure agreement. Simply mention this when placing your order in the question box and we'll have you email us the agreement to sign and fax back. We also have a template agreement we use with clients that have us handle cleaning on an ongoing basis. This can also be used for privacy issues.

Q. List management company XYZ has said that our list exceeds their spam threshold. Will cleaning help bring it to acceptable levels?

A. Our cleaning service does not remove or make note of spam traps.

Q. Our list is over (X) subscribers, do you offer additional volume discounts over 500,000 email addresses?

A. Our 500,000+ rate is the lowest we can possibly go because the service is very labor intensive.

Q. What format do we get our report in?

A. Reports are provided in an Excel spreadsheet with multiple worksheets. Each worksheet will contain the output for each category of addresses. For larger lists, multiple worksheets may be used for a single category. You also have the option of having reports returned in plain text files.

If you have more than just email address on your subscribers, we can also work with you to provide you with your final report in a format most suitable for your needs. Note: reformatting of data after we have already completed the final report based on initial communications will incur additional charges starting at $25 depending on your needs.

Q. What format do we need to provide our data in?

A. We recommend saving your email addresses in a text file with one address per line. Zip the file and send to us to the email address we provide you with after your deposit has been made. If your file exceeds 10 MB in size, please upload to a protected FTP area on your server/site and provide us with log in information. If you do not have the ability to create a protected FTP area, please let us know when placing your order and we will create one on our side so that you can upload the file. If you prefer, you can also burn your data to a CD and send it to us by overnight courier. Again, let us know if you prefer doing this when placing your order.

Q. Are there any ISPs you cannot provide results on?

A. We cannot provide results on Yahoo addresses since Yahoo does not use standard SMTP connections. All Yahoo addresses will return a valid result. There may be some smaller organizations that do not follow standard protocol as well. We suggest that you either do not include your Yahoo addresses to avoid unnecessary extra charges.

Q. How do you do your verification?

A. We follow a multi-step process. First, we will conduct a random check of a small portion of your list. This is to estimate the number of undeliverable addresses. For lists that have a higher than 25% undeliverable rate, we slow down the throttle for checking. The procedure we follow is similar to sending an actual email: we will first attempt to reach a host server. If we are able to do so, then we check to see if the user's email address exists and is able to accept email. We do not send an actual email to the recipient server. We create a log file of all of the connections/failures and from this, we manually prepare your report.

Q. How accurate is your service?

A. We strive for as close to 100% accuracy as we can achieve. Many email users now require verification before email can get through, email accounts are abandoned and not terminated, email accounts become full and their servers do not return appropriate messages, some email servers will give false positives (meaning they say an account exists when it does not), we also estimate anywhere between 3 and 20% of confirmed addresses no longer exist because of employees leaving companies (where their email returns an autoresponder or is forwarded to another employee). That being said, for most lists, when compared to delivery using services such as our ListCast.com broadcast service, we reach on average 75-85% accuracy.

Q. After using your cleaning service, we are still getting a lot of bounces from addresses you reported as being valid. Why is this?

A. Some mail servers will not return non-existent email address errors when performing a simple SMTP check. This accounts for a small portion of verified addresses. What is also likely is that your sending mail server has been blacklisted or is in an IP address range that has been blacklisted either by a recipient server or one of the blacklisting services. In addition, there is no way utilizing our service to know the results of emails that are forwarded to another address that is not deliverable. Clients that use our service report back to us that anywhere between 2 to 15%, with an average of 10%, of reported-valid addresses bounce.

Q. We have difficulties with getting any email through to AOL subscribers, will your cleaning service help improve this?

A. The difficult answer is yes and no. If you see http://postmaster.aol.com - this will give you plenty of information about AOL's current procedures. Using our service can help reduce the number of delivery attempts you make to non-existent AOL addresses since you will be notified of which addresses can/should be removed from your list. However, we are unable to tell you which members may have blocked your address or any similar information. If AOL subscribers represent a significant portion of your subscriber list, we recommend that you use a delivery service that has a direct feedback loop established with AOL and is white-listed, such as our ListCast.com service.

Q. We track bounces on our own, but haven't been purging them from our lists in case they were false bounce reports. Should we send you our full list or only the bounces to have cleaned?

A. It's a good idea to have both those bouncing and those not bouncing returned since not all ISPs will return bounces if they have blocked your sending server. (ie they will simply drop the email) One of the reasons ISPs and organizations block sending servers is because of seeing a high number of undeliverables come from a single source. Cleaning your list might mean that you are able to get through to more of your subscribers. Consequently, it's a good idea to check all addresses on your list and not just the ones you are getting bounce notices back on.

Q. Once our list is clean, do you have any recommendations for maintaining good list hygiene in the future?

A. Good list hygiene starts even before you send out an email. You'll want to make sure you are on double opt-in service to ensure as high a delivery rate as possible. Unless you have the in-house resources/staff to devote to ISP relations, we recommend outsourcing your list hosting to a company such as our ListCast.com service. If you do continue to mail in-house, you'll want to make sure that your sending server's IP address is not on blacklists or in a blacklisted IP range. Make sure to remove hard bounces (ie where a mailbox doesn't exist) as soon as you are made aware of them. Remove full mailboxes or inactive accounts within no greater than 30 days (preferably 14). Of course, honor removal requests and be sure to take care of that before you send out future emails. Make sure your abuse.net record is kept up-to-date and that your sending IP address has reverse DNS configured. Ensure that the from address on your outgoing emails is actually monitored by a human being. Be sure to include SPAM-compliant information such as removal instructions and your postal mailing address. Check the content of your outgoing emails to see how it weighs with Spam Assassin to avoid content filtering.

Q. Can I order your cleaning service now and then get the auditing report at a later date?

A. If you order the auditing report within 14 days of when your cleaning was completed, we can providing you with it based on your previous cleaning results. The date shown on the auditing report will be based on when the cleaning was originally performed. That being said, the auditing report would be subject to our minimum charge of $150 rather than the $50 fee if ordered at the same time as the cleaning.

Q. I have my email addresses stored in Outlook (or some other format). Can you get these out for me somehow?

I have email addresses in saved files from submitted forms. Can you work with these?

A. We require data to be in plain text, .csv, tab delimited or Excel spreadsheet/worksheet format.

For form files that need to be parsed, we charge an hourly rate. ($50 per hour.) Unless the files are structured in identical format and line spacing, we cannot quote in advance. Please mention this as a requirement when contacting us.

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