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| ==Accessing Melissa Data’s web services and staying up to date== | | [[Global Email V3|← Global Email V3]] |
| Melissa Data Web Services are authenticated using a CustomerID or a License string. The Customer ID is provided to you by your customer service representative or through an automatically generated email after signing up for a promotional demo.
| | ==Watch your email reputation== |
| | Email marketing campaign servers with a low email reputation score will typically experience aggressive algorithms that will filter every email coming from that specific IP address. On the other hand, maintaining a high reputation score will see less intrusive filtering only applied to individual emails and email campaigns instead of blanket IP addresses. It would be definitely beneficial to not let other users to influence your email reputation. For example, if you are on a shared server – other companies/users could be sending out their own campaigns without filtering emails through our service. It would be a waste if you spent all the time and investment controlling your email campaigns and someone else is just email blasting causing the entire IP to be affected. |
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| | ==Improve your email reputation== |
| | After using our service to filter out emails, if the scores are already terrible for your current email campaign server IPs, it might benefit to do email campaigns on a new or more reputable IP to see better ROI. This would start your email reputation on a clean slate. As a disclaimer, we are not sure how feasible this would be for everybody but your team will need to discuss internally. However, using our service on existing IP should raise the reputation score for that specific IP. On IPs with existing completed high volume campaigns, the scores will be slow to change. |
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| Due to the nature of our business and our commitment to improving our services, sometimes there will be changes. We strongly recommend you create an email distribution group address for several technical users in your organization, that will be responsible for consuming our services, and convey that email address to your Melissa Data customer service representative. This email address will be used in case we need to notify you of upcoming change either to the service, the data or the network infrastructure. Also kindly add melissadata.com to your domain whitelist so this vital communication is not blocked.
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| | | [[Category:Global Email V3]] |
| ==Single Record vs Batch Processing==
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| Melissa Data web services are capable of both single record real-time processing and batch processing. The difference is simply in the number of records sent in each request. Melissa Data web services take an array of records. This array can contain a single record or 100 records. For a real time process like a web form entry or a call center application, send in a request with one record. For batch processing scenario like a database, send requests of up to 100 records until all the records are processed.
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| ==Error Handling==
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| Since Melissa Data uses multiple clustered servers, in the unlikely event that one server is temporarily overloaded or down, it is very likely that another server is up and running. For this reason, it is best to catch any errors returned by the service and retry. We recommend retrying up to 5 times.
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| <pre>
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| int Retry = 0;
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| Boolean ReqRet = false;
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| do
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| {
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| try
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| {
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| // Perform Phone Lookup and store results to the Response
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| ResPhone = PhoneClient.doPhoneCheck(ReqPhone);
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| ReqRet = true;
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| }
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| catch (Exception ex)
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| {
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| MessageBox.Show(ex.ToString());
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| Retry++;
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| }
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| } while ((ReqRet == false) && (Retry < 5));2
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| </pre>
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| ==Network Layer Considerations==
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| ===IP Addresses===
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| If your company uses a firewall for security, you will need to add our IP address ranges to your list of allowable IP addresses in order to communicate with our web services. Please see this page:
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| <pre>
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| http://www.melissadata.com/tech/webservices-ip-information.htm
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| </pre>
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| We give out best effort to plan ahead and allocated IP ranges for the future, however, it is possible that we will need to add IP ranges as we expand and upgrade or infrastructure. We will send out multiple notifications of any impending update. This is a reason to make sure you have your technical contacts registered with Melissa Data
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| (See [[#Accessing Melissa Data’s web services and staying up to date|Accessing Melissa Data’s Web Services]]).
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| ===Ports===
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| Melissa Data uses the default ports of 80 for http and 443 for https.
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| ===Using specific IP’s===
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| Melissa Data does not allow you to access our services using direct IP addresses. We have multiple server clusters and use a load balancing system to distribute incoming traffic. To update our servers, we have to periodically need to take them down and redistribute traffic to available servers.
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| ===TTL===
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| To update a server, we take it off of our load balancer and let it drain of traffic. Then, we stop the web service and update the server. People accessing the service using our domain name will automatically be directed to available servers only. However, if your DNS caches the resolved IP address for a significant length of time, it is possible the cached server will be down when you try to hit it. For this reason, if you have access to your DNS TTL (time to live) option, please set it to a value of 10 minutes or less.
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| ==Speed Considerations==
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| If speed is a top concern for you, there are a few strategies that can be employed to increase the normal speed of using the service. They are ranked in terms of least effective to most effective.
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| ===Use batch instead of single===
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| Processing 100 records at a time will always have a faster per record speed than a single record.
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| ===Order by Zip code===
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| Ordering the records by zip code within each request can have a small increase the speed of the request.
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| ===Compression===
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| For our services that allow GZip compression, turning it on can have up to a 10% increase in speed. GZip is usually built into a programming language and turned on simply by a flag.
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| ===Multi-Threading===
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| Increasing the number of threads is an effective way to quickly increase the speed of using our services. We recommend having between 3-5 threads for batch processing.
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| ===Contact Verification Server===
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| For our enterprise customers with speed and/or privacy concerns, we can make available a local server hosting our web services. This server is dedicated to you so that you are not sharing server resources with anyone else. Additionally, since the server is located within your organization, the data does not have to travel over long distances. Also, authentication is turned off to further increase speed. Contact your sales representative if you are interested in this solution.
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| ==Understanding the different protocols SOAP vs XML vs REST vs JSON==
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| Melissa Data web services are available in multiple protocols in order to provide our customers a wide range of technologies to fit into their current architecture. The terminologies used above (SOAP, XML, REST, JSON) are not strictly technologically accurate, but used to differentiate the different options available. In the end, all the protocols return the same data, so the choice is really one of programming preference.
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| ===SOAP===
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| Ideal for languages with SOAP development toolkits like Visual Studio .NET. This makes consuming and using the service very easy. The SOAP protocol can be used for both single record processing and batch.
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| A side note for Java developers planning on using SOAP with our web services: please consider using XML instead. Using SOAP entails generating code from the WSDL to invoke the service's methods which is not always a sure process as changes or upgrades to the web services in the future could break client code. Using XML instead is less problematic based on our experiences working with clients on such cases. Both XML and SOAP have similar capabilities in that both protocols allows single record and batch processing.
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| ===XML===
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| XML is a HTTP POST call where you send in a request in xml format and receive a response in xml format. The format of the request must follow the structure defined in our documentation for each specific service.
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| ===JSON===
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| JSON is also a HTTP POST call just like XML. The only difference is that the request and response uses the JSON format instead of XML format.
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| ===REST===
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| REST is a HTTP GET call. This allows you to quickly formulate a call within the URL and submit it through a browser. An example of a REST call:
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| <pre>
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| https://personator.melissadata.net/v3/WEB/ContactVerify/
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| doContactVerify?&id=123456&act=Check&a1=22382%20avenida
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| %20empresa&postal=92688
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| </pre>
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| The returned response is in XML and is identical to what is returned by the XML HTTP POST call.
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| Only one record can use sent using a REST call so it is ideal for real time single record processing.
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| ==Special Character Handling==
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| The XML and REST protocols require special character handling when creating your request and interpreting the response. This is because certain special characters are reserved within the XML language.
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| The following XML encoding should be implemented to correctly handle reserved special characters:
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| {|class="alternate01" cellspacing="0"
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| !Character
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| !style="border-right:0px;"|Encoding
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| |-
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| |&
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| |& (ampersand)
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| |-
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| |“
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| |" (left/right quotes should be replaced with straight quotes)
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| |-
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| |‘
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| |' (apostrophe)
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| |-
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| |<
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| |< (less-than)
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| |-
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| |>
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| |> (greater-than)
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| |}
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| The following URL encoding should be implemented when using REST to correctly handle reserved special characters:
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| {|class="alternate01" cellspacing="0"
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| !Character
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| !style="border-right:0px;"|Encoding
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| |-
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| |Space
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| |%20 or +
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| |-
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| |*
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| |%2A
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| |-
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| |#
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| |%23
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| |-
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| |&
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| |%26
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| |-
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| |%
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| |%25
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| |-
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| |$
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| |%28
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| |}
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| ==Reporting Errors==
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| If you are experiencing errors trying to connect to our web services or interruptions to the service, you can:
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| #Submit a support ticket at support.melissadata.com.
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| #Call Tech Support at 1-800-800-6245 ext 4.
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| If you are experiencing a sudden loss of service, please be ready to provide us with as much of the following pieces of information so that we can assist you promptly and investigate thoroughly.
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| *Your Customer ID
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| *The location of your server accessing the web service
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| *The URL of the web service you are using
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| *The type of error you are experiencing in detail
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| *Any error messages or logs you may have
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| *Date and time of occurrences
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| *Behavior of the incidents (is it all the time or periodic. If peridoc, what percentage of requests are affect).
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| *What is your IP Address?
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| *Are you using a proxy or firewall?
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| *Any other information you think may be relevant
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| [[Category:Web Services]] | |
| [[Category:Best Practices]] | | [[Category:Best Practices]] |
← Global Email V3
Watch your email reputation
Email marketing campaign servers with a low email reputation score will typically experience aggressive algorithms that will filter every email coming from that specific IP address. On the other hand, maintaining a high reputation score will see less intrusive filtering only applied to individual emails and email campaigns instead of blanket IP addresses. It would be definitely beneficial to not let other users to influence your email reputation. For example, if you are on a shared server – other companies/users could be sending out their own campaigns without filtering emails through our service. It would be a waste if you spent all the time and investment controlling your email campaigns and someone else is just email blasting causing the entire IP to be affected.
Improve your email reputation
After using our service to filter out emails, if the scores are already terrible for your current email campaign server IPs, it might benefit to do email campaigns on a new or more reputable IP to see better ROI. This would start your email reputation on a clean slate. As a disclaimer, we are not sure how feasible this would be for everybody but your team will need to discuss internally. However, using our service on existing IP should raise the reputation score for that specific IP. On IPs with existing completed high volume campaigns, the scores will be slow to change.