hi, i've got a music website working for the last 10 years, i have a mailing list subscription box and now it has around 30k registrations because i had no captcha verification. I believe around 2k should be correct email addresses. Any way of verifying the email addresses and cleaning it up?<p>thanks
From experience (in the past I managed a mailing list with over one million subscribers), the only good list of emails is one where everyone has done a double-opt-in, a.k.a. confirmed opt-in.<p>We had to do it this way, not only because it is law in many countries (and the site offered legal advice!), but because when running a mailing list that large, you need to do everything you can to run it properly: because you will inevitably run into problems with various ISPs spam traps, having double-opt-in makes it a little easier to get someone to un-ban your servers if/when the situation arises. But I digress.<p>I agree with a previous commenter, Piskvorr - send everyone a mail asking them to confirm their subscription.<p>FWIW, we didn't use captchas - we didn't see the need as we were using double-opt-in (analytics said only a tiny percentage of sign-ups on our site didn't confirm)<p>edit: I meant to include this link <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opt-in_email#Confirmed_opt-in_.28COI.29_.2F_Double_opt-in_.28DOI.29" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opt-in_email#Confirmed_opt-in_...</a>
The only actual verification is to send an email saying "Hello, is there anybody out there? You gave us your address [some way], still interested?"
Curious what business value will be returned by purging emails. My thinking is that keeping track of 2k email addresses in a person's head is no more practical than keeping track of 30k and likewise tracking 30k in a database is no more difficult than tracking 2k.<p>A starting point might be including avenues of engagement in the email list such as soliciting feedback.<p>Good luck.