Smart Email Validation for Dataverse(preview)

You might remember that I wrote an article about the email validation feature which went into public preview back in October of 2022. (Yes it is still in preview today!). This feature allowed us to validate email addresses for leads (and now also contacts) in Dynamics 365 Sales. As you might or might not know, leads and contacts have several email address columns; ‘emailaddress1‘, ‘emailaddress2‘, and ‘emailaddress3, but unfortunately the validation rules related to this feature would only validate the primary email address columns(system name ‘emailaddress1‘). If you haven’t read the article you can do so here. The feature that I am discussing today is a different feature. When the smart email validation(preview) for Dataverse is enabled, any model-driven app using a text column with email format will be automatically validated. However, validations are not performed on addresses that are bulk imported. The other thing that is important to understand is that the smart email validation currently only works with model-driven apps, and NOT for canvas apps.

Enabling the Smart Email Validation for Dataverse(preview)

First things first! In order to preview this feature your environment needs to be in the following regions , as these are the regions that are part of the preview:  Asia (East, Southeast), Australia (East, Southeast), Canada (Central, East), Europe (North, West), France (Central, South), India (Central, South), Japan (East, West), South America – Brazil (South), Switzerland (North, West), UAE (North), UK (South, West), US (East, West). Now that we’ve determined that your environment is in one of the regions mentioned above there are two things that will need to be turned on in order to try out this preview feature. The Data Validation setting in the Power Platform environment needs to be enabled. This setting is turned off by default. You can enable this by navigating to admin.powerplatform.com and clicking ‘environments’ on the left hand side. Then click on the environment you want to enable the setting for. Once the environment opens, click the ‘settings’ button on the command bar. Expand the ‘Product’ setting and click on ‘features’. Scroll all the way down to the page, until you see ‘Data Validation’, and set the toggle to ‘on’.

The next step is to enable the Smart Email Validation for Dataverse(preview) in a model driven app. NOTE: If you want to enable this feature to multiple model-driven apps, you’ll need to follow the below steps for each app. Navigate to make.powerapps.com and click on ‘Apps’ on the sitemap. This will take you to a window where you’ll see all the apps in your environment. Click on the three dots (…) next to an app and select ‘edit’. Once the app editor loads, click on ‘settings’ on the command bar. In the settings window that opens, you’ll notice three different sections on the left hand side of the screen. Click on ‘Upcoming’ and set the toggle next to ‘Enable Smart Email Address Validation Control’ to ‘yes’ and click ‘Save’. This will enable the feature in your app. Keep in mind that this toggle can be set to ‘yes’ even when the Data Validation in the environment is not enabled, so make sure you check that first!

Functionality

So what exactly does this feature check for? When a user changes the email address of a record in a model-driven app, or when they create a new record where the email address is populated, the system will check the email address in the email address column. Users don’t have to wait for the record to be saved, as soon as the email address column has data, the verification will run and show the results. I found that what the system checks for is very similar to what the email validation for leads and contacts checks for (which makes sense to me!):

• Disposable domain: An email address that contains a known temporary or disposable email domain
• Expired email addresses: This is an expired email account that can no longer send or receive emails
• Emails that bounce back: This is an email address that can’t receive a message because it’s expired
• Incorrect syntax: For example, an email address that doesn’t contain both a username and an email domain
• Test or spam email addresses: An email address that contains known indicators of a test or spam address in the email header or metadata, IP address, HTML code of the email, and email content and formatting

Unfortunately if an email address is showing as an invalid address, users can still save the record with the invalid email address! I really would’ve liked it if the invalid data in the email address field(s) couldn’t be saved. As long as users can still save data that is incorrect, this is not helping organizations keeping their data clean.

Another thing I noticed is that when I tried the email validation using the quick create form for contacts, the data validation worked as intended. I entered the email address, the system told me it was verifying it, and I got the result of the validation pretty quick. When I tried this by using the contact main form, I noticed that nothing happened when I tried to create a new contact record or update the email address for an existing contact. After a little while this started to work, so if this doesn’t work immediately after you’ve enabled this functionality, I suggest you give it a little bit of time.

Lead/Contact Email Validation vs Dataverse Email Validation

As I mentioned above, there are still a few pretty significant differences between the email validation in Dynamics 365 Sales (for contacts and leads) and the Dataverse email validation. The first difference I want to mention is that for the Dynamics 365 Sales email validation, the process runs every few hours (and only checks the one primary email address) while the dataverse validation runs immediately, after a user enters an email address. Another difference is that when a lead or contact record is opened and an email address is invalid, the Dynamics 365 Sales email validation will show users a visual warning of that invalid email address. This is not the case with Dataverse validation. Yes, users will see whether or not there is an issue with an email address when they enter an email address, but if they open an existing record where the email address is invalid, there will not be a visual warning. Lastly, when using the Dynamics 365 Sales email validation users can mark an invalid email address as valid, which is also not something that is available in the Dataverse validation. I hope you enjoyed reading this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!