The Validator: A success story

(Publishers Note: Email marketing remains wildly popular. From consumer products to opportunities, marketers use email to advertise their goods and services. While bulk email is often employed, safe lists are probably the venues most used by on line marketers. This ususally means having one or more safe list submitters and then broadcasting to hundreds, sometimes thousands of lists. All those lists must first be validated. This article is from the creator of an extremely useful service called THE VALIDATOR.)

In 1998 I started using Safe lists, just a handful to begin with, logging in daily and sending ads by hand. As you can imagine I did not receive much of a response to my ads! So as we all do, I took the plunge and joined a big safe list submitter, there weren't many of them around at the time and there was no such thing as automated validations!.

Hundreds of validation links came flowing into my email account along with ads from admin owners that validated my account by hand. For 4 days I was getting buried in emails hiding my validation links.

It became that bad in the end I gave up my submitter membership after 5 days, which had just cost me $24.95, swearing never to use a submitter again!

After a couple of days of calming down I started to wonder what could be used to save all the hassles of validating these links and approached a very good friend of mine that was extremely good at writing programs and scripts. He laughed when I told him what I had gone through and looking back so did I.

We sat down and came up with the first The Validator but it had its problems although it downloaded validation links it also downloaded all the other links we receive in emails as well! So my first attempt brought in 22,000 links the program dutifully clicked through them all but took 38 hours and 20 minutes precisely! The other problem we had was it also downloaded virus links, so you can imagine the chaos that caused!

Finally The Validator was created. It has been improved a lot since then, generally our time for processing validations is around about 2 hours. It searches out any virus' found in emails and will NOT download them, this email is then deleted from the web server and validations carry on.

A lot of people have asked "why should I use The Validator when my submitter has an onboard validation service".

My answer to them is simple ask your submitter admin if they also process validations for contact email addresses, most safelist hosts now require this, their answer will be NO. The onboard validation script can only validate one email account per set of safe lists. You can read more about this on our site Impressions-hosting.com

Whilst The Validator is processing your validation links we watch over everyone of them so if there was a large number of safe lists that were down on their servers we can inform you of this and re-send The Validator at another time, something else that an onboard validation script cannot do!

Although The Validator is an industrial strength program it is operated by human beings that you can talk to if needs be.

Fastads and Postads were the first submitters to start offering THE VALIDATOR (independent from the on board validator). Since then, many other submitters now use the service including XtreamNet Marketing Center.

Once The Validator was running smoothly we decided to offer everyone on the internet the chance to join a modern day Safe list Submitter with The Validator included so ALL safe lists could be validated. This way no matter what submitter you belong to or how many, you can always get your validations done.

Our service is now used by people from all over the world! It is hard to believe that our service is almost 7 years old now and just as valuable now, if not more so, than before. Safe list marketing remains very popular, and I can't imagine doing that kind of marketing without The Validator taking care of those thousands of validation emails everyone has to deal with at least once when doing email marketing.

(Debra Challinor is the author of Safelist Warrior, Inside Safelist Secrets Revealed" and an innovator in on line services including the One Buck No Bounce Wonder commercial email service and SafeAdLists.)