Email addresses are a valuable asset for email marketers, but they aren’t without their risks. A single faulty address can ruin an entire list of legitimate recipients, sending them to spam folders and damaging the sender’s reputation with email providers. Email address validation helps to prevent this by confirming that the emails in your database are valid and deliverable.

An email address trustworthiness analyzer  is a tool that examines the metadata of an email and looks for signs of bad behavior. It can be used by email service providers and by individuals to assess whether an email is trustworthy.

Email Address Trustworthiness Analyzer – Is Your Inbox Safe?

In this exploratory study, participants viewed a series of emails with and without common phishing indicators (financial information, misspellings, and threats) and were asked to give a rating of how trustworthy they felt each email appeared. Stimuli were displayed on a 22-inch high-resolution screen, and eye movements were recorded using an SMI RED 500 eye-tracker. Participants were also required to calibrate the eye tracker, and validate it to ensure consistency and accuracy of tracking.

A good way to evaluate the trustworthiness of an email is to look at its header. While some email verifiers will verify an email address and return a “valid” status, many others will simply look at the data in the header, returning a confidence score for each email that can vary from a few percent to a few hundred percent. A more thorough analysis of the email header is possible with a software solution like Email Toolkit, which can do things such as check if the email name has too many numbers or if it’s a jumble of letters that doesn’t match one of the cardholder names for a payment transaction.