Client Services role in Database production work.

Data8 are a growing data processing company looking for an enthusiastic, client facing person to join their small technical team in their offices near Cheshire Oaks. Data8 operate within a niche marketplace of Data Cleansing and work with many UK based companies to ensure that their data is accurate and up-to-date.

The role involves interfacing between the sales team and the technical team to ensure that all data processing jobs are completed to the client's satisfaction.

Skills

The successful candidate will have experience in database technologies and have strong working knowledge of SQL. Some strong experience of manipulating data with Microsoft Excel or Access is also essential. Any relevant industry experience in data processing would be a distinct advantage.

The role will involve daily contact by email and telephone with our clients so a professional and courteous attitude is essential at all times. There is a large scope to work independently towards achieving the business objectives and so the ability to run and manage small projects is important. An ideal candidate must pay great attention to detail and be able to demonstrate how this has made them successful at previous tasks.

Training & Experience

Training and support will be provided by the senior team members covering many of the latest tools and techniques, but you will also be expected to keep in touch with industry developments and share your knowledge with the rest of the team where appropriate.

Future

This is an exciting opportunity to the type of candidate that would like the opportunity to grow within the team. The role gives you exposure to lots of different cutting-edge internet technologies and also the ability to shape a young company looking forward to growing.

The salary is from £22,000 but dependent on experience. Please send CV and covering letter to careers@data-8.co.uk by Friday 24th February

We have recently announced changes to our email validation services.

Accurately validating an email address is a notoriously difficult thing to do. The simplest approach is to ensure that the syntax of the email looks correct - for example, there is an @ sign and the domain ends in a known top level domain such as .com. However, this is a very simplistic approach and allows many invalid email addresses through.

A much more useful and accurate service would check to see if the email address is alive, available and accepting emails to be sent to it.

The data8 approach now has 4 possible levels to check an email address. Consider the email address info@data-8.co.uk. This is broken into a domain part: "data-8.co.uk", and a local part: "info".

• Firstly is it syntactically correct? Are all the characters valid and it looks like an email address?
• Secondly, does the domain part refer to an internet address correctly configured to send email?
• Thirdly, is the mail server alive and responding to requests?
• Fourthly, does the mail server allow you to send emails to the local part?

Unfortunately, it is not always as simple as this. If it was, the most obvious side affect would be that email spammers would be able to generate lists of all valid email address by using trial and error. In practise, if you try to validate lots of emails in this way - and there are many software packages that you can buy that do just this - then you will quickly find yourself blacklisted and unable to send any email to anyone. Not a good situation.

Also, many email servers employ various methods to make all of this difficult. Two common tricks that we can detect here when performing our most detailed validation are:

• Catch-All - a mail server configured with a catch-all rule means that any email sent to any email address is accepted. It is either just deleted, forwarded to another email address, or rejected and bounced (a soft bounce) a few minutes later. The data8 solution now detects these mail servers so that you can distinguish between a genuine good email address and an email address that is held on a mail server with a catch-all rule.
• Grey-listing - some mail servers are configured with grey-listing techniques. This means that the mail server initially rejects any approach to send an email and says please try again later. The idea here is that spammer would tend to give up at this point and move onto the next email address. The data8 solution detects grey-listing techniques and returns a different return code.

By using a data8 cloud based solution, you are not putting yourself at risk of becoming blocked and barred for looking like an email spammer. Data8's experience of validating millions of email addresses and our relationships with the major ISPs means that our service will continue to work without risk of black listing. You can also be assured that we are giving the highest possible validation rates with the lowest false positive rate.

The data8 email validation service can be used in batch to cleanse a list of email addresses, or in real-time to validate whether the email address is correct at time of capture. Contact us to arrange for a free trial or a free data quality audit of your email addresses.

The European Commission (EC) announced a major change to the way Data Protection will be governed in a draft Data Protection Directive released yesterday.

This is serious news for any company that owns or processes data. Whilst this directive is only at draft stage, and there is a lot of lobbying to go that we might reasonably expect to take at least a couple of years, draft directives have a history of progressing to becoming law across all member states.

At the heart of the EC's intention is to simplify various complicated and disjointed laws in the various European member states, and to create one consistent directive ensuring fairness in a world that has changed enormously with regards to data and personal privacy in recent years.

According to James Mullock, Head of Technology at Osborne Clarke, the key points of the draft directive include:

• Explicit consent required in advance and on an opt-in basis
• The right to be forgotten
• An obligation to notify data protection authorities after a data breach
• Fines of up to 2% of global turnover

Concerns have been raised over quite what explicit consent means and how the right to be forgotten might adversely affect the operation of suppression files. Quite how all these changes might affect data cleansing is yet to be seen.

The DMA are claiming that the move towards an opt-in only regime for offline direct marketing has been softened compared to earlier versions however they warn against complacency as this could easily be reinstated in later versions. They have promised a fully analysis of the consequences to their members later this week.

For more information the EC has a comprehensive selection of press releases, factsheets and the full draft directive at http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/data-protection/news/120125_en.htm

We now appear to have resolved our issues with our telephone lines and everything is working as planned.

You can now contact us on our usual switchboard number 0151 355 4555 or any of the direct dial numbers for your account manager.

Our apologies to anyone inconvenienced yesterday.

Richard

Traditionally, the Mailing Preference Service has always been just short of a legal requirement. It has always been industry best practise and a requirement of the DMA Code of Practise, but did you know that MPS Screening should now be performed on all cold prospect mailings under the CAP Code?

The 12th edition of The UK Code of Non-Broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (CAP code) came into force on 1 September 2010. Complying with the code can help avoid reputational and commercial damage that can come with an upheld ASA adjudication. The CAP Code is not statutory but it is not without teeth: any consumer on your prospect list could initiate a complaint to the ASA, and now media and industry organisations that subscribe to the CAP Code are refusing advertising space to anyone who breaks the Code.

Additionally, in the opinion of the DMA and other industry bodies, it is now a legal requirement under The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading regulations 2008 to screen against the MPS. It is unclear at this stage whether any company has actually been penalised by the Unfair Trading regulations in regards to MPS Suppression. However, there are at least 5 companies who have had complaints upheld by the ASA regarding improper use of the MPS. As always, it is important to seek your own legal advice on this specific issue.

Data8 offer MPS Suppression (including MPS deceased) at very competitive rates along with a host of other data cleansing services.