Product Blog

There’s a fine line between consumer data accuracy and easy user experience (UX). For marketing purposes, you want to harvest accurate consumer data and, luckily, there are many web applications available to help you do just that. However, some of them are obtrusive, stopping the customer in their tracks and frustrating them in their quest to validate information. There are also others that send confirmation messages in an effort to increase data accuracy without interference but often with poor results. That leaves many businesses with outdated sign-up forms to reach out to consumers, which is a shame because they could be doing much better.

The history of e-mail dates back to the very early days of the Internet. The basics of the protocol were laid down as early as 1982, in RFC822. And even though this very early specification had been updated by RFC 2822 in 2008, and several updates have appeared since (e.g. 6854 in 2013), the basics of the protocol have not changed much. This is, on one hand, a considerable success of the protocol. It provides a solution to a very natural need of the users of the network: to use the Internet for sending messages like conventional mail. And this good old protocol still meets many of the requirements. In spite of the enormous amount of alternative means of online communication, e-mail has managed to maintain its popularity even today. The reasons for this include the simplicity of the protocol, the fact that it is indeed a standard. It is decentralized in the sense that there is no distinguished provider for which one has to necessarily subscribe to be able to use e-mail. This can indeed be an advantage when compared to e.g. social networks whose providers get hold of our private data when we use them.