How Do I Check If An Email Is Real?

When trying to build a healthy email list full of active subscribers, many email marketers run into issues trying to check if an email is genuine when they get new list signups. 

After all, there are many ways and reasons fake or invalid email addresses come about.

If you’re wondering how to verify an email is real or which email address verification tools may be helpful in the process, this article will have all the answers you need. Keep reading for all the details. 

How to Check If Someone’s Email Is Real?

One of the first email delivery tests you could be doing upon someone signing up for your list is to check whether email address owners actually have access to the inbox of the email they listed. This process is called an email confirmation. 

Typically, it works by sending a code or button to the listed inbox. If they can input the code in the signup form or click the button, it shows they have access to that inbox. Once they do that, they’ll be officially added to your list of subscribers.

How Can I Check an Email Without Sending It? 

That said, some email marketers wonder how to check if an email is valid without sending emails. Many in this situation will want to test if an email is reachable to avoid bounces if they never performed an initial confirmation. 

How To Verify Email Address Without Sending Email

One of the basic ways to test if email is reachable is to send an email from a different email address that isn’t on your primary business domain to the recipient in question and see if it bounces. If it bounces, you’ll typically receive a message back in a couple of minutes that says something along the lines of “server can’t be reached.” 

Some other methods that marketers may try are:

• Search contact by email address: Some may also do an online search of the email address provided to see if it pops up anywhere else attached to the contact person’s name. However, this method is unreliable. Just because it doesn’t show up in a search doesn’t prove that an email isn’t real. But it can confirm some that do show up. 
• IP address lookups and running DNS records: Another method that can help is looking up IP addresses or DNS records associated with the email that signed up. You can use tools like MXToolbox for this. That said, it’s a pretty technical process that can be tedious to do over and over again for every subscriber on your list. 
• Ping the server: You could also ping the server of the email address in question to see if you get a positive activity signal back. This can be done with tools like PuTTY for Telnet. Although, this is, again, a pretty technical and tedious process. 

As you can see from this list, these options can all help but may not be the best fit for busy marketers with many tasks they already have to handle. Fortunately, there’s another solution that may be a better fit. 

How Do I Verify an Email That Doesn’t Exist? 

If you think you have some email addresses on your list that don’t exist, you can use tools called bulk email verifiers to help. 

A bulk verifier does many of the earlier tests, like IP address lookups, server pings, and running DNS records. However, rather than it being a manual, technical, and tedious process, it handles it all in the background. Plus, you get results in a matter of seconds or minutes. 

How Can I Verify an Email Address Is Real for Free? 

Hearing about bulk verifiers, you may wonder if there’s a way to use them for free. There are a few tools that allow you to verify email addresses without sending emails for free, but they do come with their pros and cons. 

How To Do a Free Check Email Address Owner

Tools like Bulk Email Checker and NeverBounce will allow you to do free checks for email address ownership. However, NeverBounce only offers a limited free trial before you have to pay, and Bulk Email Checker requires you to input each email address one at a time, which is still too tedious for busy email marketers. 

In either case, if you have thousands of emails on your list, you’re much better off going with premium email verification tools. 

How Do I Verify an Email Address List? 

If you’re looking for one of the best long-term solutions to verify a list of emails and keep it clean, AudiencePoint can help. 

Our tools can provide more accurate solutions using second-party data that accounts for 90% of U.S. consumers and the most accurate email marketing metrics based on your audience’s engagement that are up-to-date with today’s email marketing standards. Our email verification API will return results as new subscribers join your list.

How AudiencePoint Can Help

AudiencePoint offers email insight software. It combines second-party data and detailed metrics from how your audience engages with content. That process helps our tools identify data-based solutions in an actionable way to improve your email marketing strategy. 

AudiencePoint can help you verify emails on your list are real and active while suppressing any dormant emails to improve deliverability. Plus, it’ll do continuous checks to inform you when subscribers become inactive and need to be re-engaged and when new subscribers are added to ensure the email they used is valid. 

On top of that, our software uses metrics that are up-to-date with today’s email marketing standards, such as isolating Apple MPP opens from reporting. It helps our insight software gather even more data about aspects like open rates that help verify your subscribers are active while providing you with strategies to improve engagement further.  

If all this sounds like the solution to your needs, contact us today to learn more.