Today, most businesses rely quite heavily on social media to keep in contact with existing and potential customers. However, from a marketing and customer service perspective, email is still king. The trouble is that email is an aging technology filled with a plethora of security issues. For proof of that, look no further than the companies still puzzling over how to stop spam from inundating their mailboxes. That means software developers still need to integrate email functionality—like user address collection and direct email communications—into customer-facing applications. As they do, they need to find ways to mitigate the array of security issues that come with doing so. That effort typically begins with email validation and verification.
Email validation and verification methods can help developers harden their applications against email abuse attacks. It can also help keep email databases collected via their apps free of bogus information. But there's more than one way to programmatically validate and verify emails these days. Choosing the right one for the job depends on the purpose of the functionality and how accurate you need it to be. To help developers with this critical task, here are five ways to incorporate email validation and verification into your apps in order of their overall accuracy and utility.