Verify an Email Address: Why and How

It’s common to have a long list of emails of your potential customers and partners. And if you run an online business, email marketing is probably one of the tools that you often use. It is thus handy to keep your mailing list clean. Emails in your database might be collected months, or even years, ago and many of them might be invalid by now.

Email address verification is not as simple as it might seem. In this post, we will walk you through: Why should we verify email address, and how to verify email address?

Why should we verify email addresses?

1.       Being stuck with bounces

As discussed, email bounces are the biggest nightmares of a cold email campaign. Continous bounce back degrades your email account’s authenticity and domain quality. Your email account might get listed in the spam index of various email service providers (ESP) and end up by getting blocked.

2.       Worse sender reputation score and email deliverability.

Every email account has a sender reputation score that helps the recipient to decide the quality of the email. The higher the score, the better is the email deliverability and vice versa.

If you send emails to invalid or spammy email accounts frequently, it can lead to suspension of your email account.

Verifying your email account helps you in getting your emails to the right recipient in an authentic manner. This will keep your email account healthy and increase your reputation score.

3.       Getting worse results from your email campaign

You import a list of recipients for scheduling an email campaign. With large lists, the chances of email bounce also increase. This eventually affects your whole email campaign performance.

In addition, you spend a lot of time and energy on an email campaign, which might go to vain if it doesn’t provide you with the desired results.

Email account verification excludes the bad contacts from your lists, which increases your email deliverability. You also receive a higher open rate and reply rate that boosts your email campaigning performance.

How to verify an email address?

You have a couple of different options to verify email addresses.

l  Free email verifier tools: If you’re sending a low number of emails (or just need to verify an email address every now and then), a free tool will work great.

l  Email finder tools with built-in verification. If you’re scaling email campaigns and don’t want to risk bouncing, go with an email finder tool that will automatically find and verify any given email address.

#1: Manually verify email address

Google ‘email checker’ or ‘email verifier’ and you’ll find a host of free options to verify email address without sending an email.

Our favorite is aptly named email-checker.net. It’s free and doesn’t require any installation. The quick and easy email checker will tell you whether or not an email address is valid in a matter of milliseconds.

#2: Use an email finder tool with verification

Most email finder tools offer the ability to verify email addresses. The key is to find a tool that automatically verifies your email address, rather than using up credits or charging you extra to take the verification step.

A couple of things to look for:

l  Ideally you want a tool that gives you the option to verify emails from a prospecting tool like Sales Nav or upload your list, depending on your workflow.

l  You need a tool that only charges you for verified, up-to-date email addresses.

#3 Verify email using SMTP protocol

here are several SMTP commands that can be used for this. These are EXPN, VRFY, and RCPT TO. EXPN and VRFY are rarely enabled in today’s mail systems, this is why the most common verification command is RCPT TO. There are several steps that have to be done before a client can use the RCPT TO command:

1.       Find IP address of the target mail server.

2.       Establish a connection to the target mail server.

3.       Send HELO or EHLO command.

4.       Send MAIL FROM command.

5.       Now we can send RCPT TO command.