Tuesday Jan 5th, 2010
It’s snowing (heavily) today in the UK. In the chaos of the travel problems resulting from snow & ice, we’ve managed to put in some huge effort to get the new Email Checker available for general release.
So, here it is. After a year+ of development, testing and refining we now have what is (based on our market research), the best email address checking service on the planet.
“Best?” Bold claims huh? Let’s back the claims up with some facts by looking at the “competition”:
Really “The Best”? The Competition Exposed
Desktop Software
“Desktop” software is software that you buy, download and install. We found at least 3 examples of this software for checking email addresses.
Our verdict:
- Too complicated – IT expertise needed to configure and integrate
- Highly inaccurate results
Bureaux Solutions
By “bureaux” we mean services that you manaully send your lists of email to. They do the validation work and send you the results.
Our verdict:
- Expensive! We found one company charging around $5 per thousand email addresses! Our service works out a fraction of this.
Behind The Scenes – What It Took to Get To Release
This project started based on the numerous requests that we were getting for bulk email checking capability. Conceptually, it should be easy to deliver bulk email address checking right? Yes, we thought so too all that time ago.
Way back at the beginning of the design, we thought: “just take our single email address checker and scale it up”:-no problem! How wrong we were. It has been anything but “simple”.
Along the way, we’ve had to deal with what seems like an endless stream of technical challenges ranging from getting it to run fast enough to achiveing the accuracy of results that we feel is acceptable.
For the technically minded, here are some of the cutting edge technologies that we’ve had to use to get to a viable service:
- SQL
- MSMQ
- Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
- Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
- SQL Broker & Notification Services
- PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN). We use our own IPN component to simplify things enormously (PayPal IPN IS complex).
- SQL Management Objects (SMO)
The service itself consists of 4 service programs that span multiple servers, 1 client (the web interface), and a whole host of external service such as fast DNS resolution (we use Google DNS).
To get the performance up (it takes 0.07 seconds on average to validate one email), we’ve had to write custom multi-threaded server software. Anyone who is in the software game will tell yout that this multithreading can be a complete nightmare!
On top of designing, building and testing this lot, there is the challenge of configuration – email checker relies heavily on external resources (e.g. email servers, DNS etc). It took many weeks of tweaking to get the right configuration settings (e.g. timeouts etc) to deliver maximum accuracy.
On top of this lot, there has been the dedicated web site (i.e. this website that you’re reading now:)) to design, build, test and populate with content.
Hopefully this gives some idea of the amount of work that’s gone into this project.
Although the amount of work far exceeded what we had expected and planned for, there is one driving principle that has not changed for us:-
We believe that our service offers the best value for money!
During all of the budget and timescale overruns on this project, we kept going because we firmly believe that our competitors do not offer either cost effective or fit-for-purpose solutions. It is therefore our sincere hope that our service can meet the demands and expectations of discerning customers.
Ultimately, we’re proud of this service and stand by our belief that it is “the best” option for anyone that has email lists to validate.
