Email Validation(preview) in Dynamics 365 Sales

Today I am writing an article about yet another preview feature that you can try out in your sandbox environment today. This feature went into public preview this month (October 2022) and if you don’t see the option in your environment yet, you just need to wait a little longer until it reaches your region. Before showing you what this does, let’s first talk about what exactly it is!
So we all know how important it is to have CORRECT contact information in your database so that sales reps can actually get in contact with these people. This preview features focuses on email addresses for lead records. Most of the time email addresses in a database are not validated which brings down the quality of those leads. You can imagine if you have any number of leads in your system with email addresses that are incorrect or invalid this will impact the chance of ever winning a deal with them because you simply don’t have a way to contact them!

The email validation(preview) functionality in Dynamics 365 Sales will be able to help with this. This is simply a feature that you can turn on, after which the system will review email addresses on active leads in your database. When leads are found which have an email address that is not valid, sales reps will get a visual warning on the lead form which shows as a red envelope icon next to the email address entered in the email address column. They will also be able to see this in the sales accelerator work list card and in the up-next widget on the lead form.

Validation Rules

Now there are a few things that you need to know about this feature. Let’s start with the email validation and what the system exactly looks at when it comes to deciding if an email address is a potential incorrect email address:

• Disposable domains: These are temporary email addresses that are used to avoid receiving emails in an actively monitored mailbox. Any email addresses that contain a disposable domain will be flagged as invalid
• Incorrect syntax: These are email addresses that don’t have the proper syntax of username@domain
• Expired email address: The name itself explains it, these are email accounts that have expired and can no longer receive any emails
• Bounced emails: Any email addresses for which messages get bounced back and therefor can’t receive any email messages
• Spam or test email addresses: These are the email addresses that have known indicators, test or spam email addresses in the header, metadata, IP address, email HTML, content or formatting

Besides the email validation rules you need to understand that there are also some rules on which records will be included for validation. The first thing to note is that this feature currently only works for records in the leads table. No other tables are included today, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be later. However, this is speculation as my guess is as good as yours! The way it works today (and I don’t know if this will change or not once this gets out of preview!) is that when you turn the feature on, the validation rules will immediately run on all active lead records that are LESS THAN 180 days old. My first question was about the 180 days. Is this based on when the lead was created or when it was edited? The answer to that question is any active leads that are in your system that were created or edited less than 180 days ago, will be validated. Any leads that fall outside of that 180 days will not be validated. As mentioned before, only ACTIVE leads will be validated, leads that have been disqualified are not active, so they will not be included either. Lastly it’s important to understand that this feature is not available in any custom apps you might have built. This is strictly for the Sales Hub in Dynamics 365 Sales.

Enable Email Validation (preview)

In order to enable email validation you’ll need to open the sales hub and navigate to App Settings from the area chooser. You’ll notice ‘Email Validation’ below the Data Improvement section on the sitemap on the left hand side. When you click on ‘Email Validation’, you’ll notice the slider which you can use to enable the feature.

The first time you turn on the email validation (preview) feature in your environment, the lead validation logic will run on all active leads that have been created or edited less than 180 days ago, as mentioned earlier. The way this works is that batches of 1000 records are being created and processed during the validation. After this first run, the system will run the validation again every 6 hours. This is not something that we can schedule ourselves, this is how this functionality works.

Email columns examined

Now let’s take a look at which email addresses are being examined when this feature has been turned on! You might or might not know that the lead table actually has a 3 email address columns out of the box. The system names of these columns are emailaddress1, emailaddress2, and emailaddress3. Maybe you added some email address columns yourself as well? You’ll be sad to learn that only email addresses in the primary email address column (in other words, only data in the emailaddress1 column) will be examined by the system when this feature is enabled. So this means if you have the other email address columns (or any custom email address columns) these will not be checked! Definitely something to keep in mind if you’re using multiple email address columns on your lead forms! I hope you found this article informative! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!