How Do I Validate an Email Address Before Sending It?

If you’ve heard about bounce rates and deliverability in email marketing, you’ll know it can have a big impact on your engagement rates. Plus, it can significantly affect your domain’s reputation in the eyes of email inbox providers. Too many bounces can trigger spam filters, resulting in more of your marketing content ending up in the spam folder. 

You want to avoid these negative impacts of an unverified email list at all costs. One of the best fixes is email address verification tools, which we’ll break down thoroughly in this article. So, if you want to know everything there is to know about validating emails before sending marketing content to prevent bounces, keep reading for all the information. 

How Do I Check If an Email Address is Legitimate and if I have Invalid Email Addresses?

There is no single email verification process. As mentioned, one of the best ways to check if an email address is legitimate is with an email verification tool. These are software programs designed to help you add only legitimate subscribers to your list and remove any fake or dormant emails to improve deliverability. 

How Does Email Verification Work?

Email validation can take place in two ways. You have the initial email verification upon signup for your list (also called email confirmation) and bulk email verification for already established email lists. 

First, let’s tackle the initial verification. When someone signs up for your list, you want to check email address ownership and access. Using verification tools, you can send a verify your email address code or button to the new subscriber’s listed email that they must enter or click to be added to your list. It shows they really have access to that inbox. 

Conversely, bulk verification will help when you have an established email list. Bulk verification tools can run several processes in the background, like SMTP checks, reviewing syntax spellings, and checking IP addresses to validate that the emails on your list are valid addresses. It’s a quick process that only takes seconds or minutes to ensure your list of full of valid email addresses. 

Can You Validate an Email Address Without Sending an Email?

You may also be wondering how to verify email addresses without sending emails. This is common when you have an already established email list that you want to avoid any further bounces with. For that, the abovementioned bulk verification tools will work well. There are also manual methods you can use, which we’ll review later in this article. 

First, let’s take a deeper look at how this process works and the specific tools used. 

How Do I Validate an Email Address Before Sending It?

Ideally, if you want to validate email addresses before adding new subscribers to your list, you would have an email confirmation system in place to help. That way, you have a much better chance of sending emails to subscribers who are real and active. 

However, if you haven’t taken this step, you still have many options for bulk verification that will help you validate your list before sending content. 

Can You Verify Email Address Online?

Several online tools can help verify email addresses online. Some common ones are Bulk Email Checker, Email Hunter, and NeverBounce. 

Are There Free Tools for Email Verification?

Now, if you’re searching for ways to verify your email address for free, you may wonder about your options. All the tools mentioned above will allow you to do some limited verification checks for free or cheap. 

However, their systems are usually very tedious. You typically have to input emails individually, which is quite time-consuming for busy email marketers. Free tools are also limited because they don’t go through every possible check to validate emails, so some fake ones could still slip through the cracks. 

Look to Premium Tools for a Better Solution to Validate Email Addresses

When looking for the best email verification tools, you want to look for premium software that is capable of being an ongoing and streamlined solution. Our insight software at AudiencePoint can help with all your needs to get you the best results. 

Our email verification solution uses second-party data and in-depth metrics about how your audience engages with content to provide you with more accurate verification. You can use our email verification API to verify new address as you receive them. 

Plus, our insight software’s processes are ongoing, so they’ll be continuously running in the background to give you updates as to when you need to re-engage inactive subscribers or remove dormant emails to improve deliverability. 

How Do I Manually Verify an Email Address in My Mail Server?

You may also wonder if there are ways to verify an email address manually. There are, but it’s important to remember that these can be pretty tedious and involve some technical processes with a learning curve. 

You can do things like pinging servers, IP address checks, or running DNS records to verify each new email that signs up for your list using tools like MXToolbox or PuTTY for Telnet. However, these processes have a bit of a learning curve, and you typically have to do one email at a time, which isn’t great when you have tons of new email list signups all the time. 

You could also check for common spam words or misspelled syntaxes like “@gmaaill.com” or similar variations that are common with fake email addresses. However, this isn’t a reliable solution since many emails can still slip through manual analysis, and it’s time-consuming. 

Your best option is to use software that can do it for you, like our insight software at AudiencePoint. 

How AudiencePoint Can Help Verify Email Addresses

AudiencePoint provides an email insight software that helps you maintain a clean and active email list of engaged subscribers. 

Our software monitors your subscribers’ activity and uses a second-party data pool that gathers 1.7 trillion data points weekly to provide you with the most accurate results. It can identify when to re-engage subscribers, suppress dormant emails, the best times to send new content, how to segment email lists accurately, and much more. 

To get help identifying invalid or inactive addresses, mitigate spam complaints, and improve your sender reputation, contact us today to learn if AudiencePoint is the right email validation tool for you.