Email and Telephone numbers Validation

Yogesh Patel

Hi Everyone,

We are currently reviewing the email and telephone validation functionalities within Aperture and would appreciate further clarity on the business logic behind these rules.

Email Validation: Aperture offers two types of validation; Format Check and Domain-Level Validation.

• While Format Check verifies if the email follows a valid syntactic structure, Domain-Level validation includes format verification and performs a DNS lookup to confirm if the email domain exists. By default, the DNS server used is Google (8.8.8.8).
• Does Domain-Level email validation include a live ping to verify if the email address is active?
• However, the system often flags email addresses as having an "Invalid Domain" or "Bad Format" without providing underlying logic or specific reasons for the classification.
• Could you please share more detail on the criteria and business logic Aperture applies when validating email addresses?

 Telephone numbers Validation: Aperture supports two modes of telephone number validation; Format and Live.

• For the Format validation, we need to specify the column containing the phone numbers you want to validate, pick the country to use for phone validation and choose the validation rule (Valid phone, Valid phone region, Possible phone etc.)
• While Format Validation can flag certain numbers as invalid, the tool does not currently explain the logic or criteria for these determinations.
• For example, the system flags certain Telephone numbers as invalid, but doesn’t provide an explanation or criteria for why they’re considered invalid.
• Could you share the business logic Aperture uses for telephone numbers validation?

We’ve reviewed the documentation available under 'Data Quality user documentation | Workflows' , but were unable to locate information about the detailed validation logic applied.

We would appreciate your support in providing a clearer understanding of the rules and mechanisms Aperture uses to validate email and telephone fields.

Thanks

Josh Boxer

Validate email (without a live check) is a series of fairly basic checks. For a more accurate validity and contactability check you can opt to use Live validation:

Data Quality user documentation | Experian Email Validation v2

Bad format - uses regex to ensure certain character like period and @ appear in certain positions and that other unsupported characters do not appear .
Invalid domain - means the part after the @ symbol is not on the DNS list or is flagged as illegitimate , disposable, harmful, nondeterministic or unverifiable.
Invalid name - checks the part before the @ symbol using a lookup against common spam or generic role accounts

Validate phone (without a live check) is a fairly basic check that uses Google's common open source library for validating international phone numbers using length and prefix to highlight any obviously incorrect numbers. So the input is the wrong length or uses the wrong prefix for phone numbers in the given country. For a more accurate validity and contactability check you can opt to use Live validation:

Data Quality user documentation | Experian Phone Validation

If there are emails or phone numbers being flagged as invalid that you think should be marked as valid then please provide some examples, either below or raise a support ticket.

Thanks

Yogesh Patel

Hi Josh,

Thank you for the response.

Could you provide us more clarity on below points:-
1- We believe that these email domains should be valid, but we are getting invalid in Aperture
poczta.onet.pl

vfemail.net

mail2world.com

jobcentreplus.gsi.gov.uk

sneakemail.com

safe-mail.net

kgh.nhs.uk

btinternet.co.uk

rhyta.com

spamcop.net

Yogesh Patel

Hi Josh,
Also, for email domain validity, Data Studio uses a Domain Name System (DNS) lookup to check whether the email address's domain exists. 
Could you provide us the list of DNS that are listed as valid?
Thanks

Josh Boxer

Thanks for the examples, I assume these are all returning Invalid domain

poczta.onet.pl - Unknown timeout
vfemail.net - Disposable
mail2world.com - Disposable
jobcentreplus.gsi.gov.uk - Unreachable (GSI is Government Secure Intranet)
sneakemail.com - Disposable
safe-mail.net - Disposable
kgh.nhs.uk - Unreachable (usually just nhs.net)
btinternet.co.uk - Invalid (should be .com)
rhyta.com - Disposable
spamcop.net - Illegitimate, spamtrap

Yogesh Patel

Hi Josh,

Thank you for providing the details.

'poczta.onet.pl' is a valid domain but failed due to time out. Do we have a solution for such domains?

Also, could you share the list of DNS that are listed as valid?

Thanks

Josh Boxer

"Data Studio uses a Domain Name System (DNS) lookup to check whether the email address's domain exists. By default, the DNS server used is Google (8.8.8.8)". Google has this tool available if it is helpful
https://dns.google/ , not sure if they provide a list, it would be large.

That .pl domain exists so unclear why it returned invalid or timeout previously, possibly try it again.