How Do You Verify If an Email Address is Real or Fake?

When building an email list, you may have noticed that you can get a lot of bot or fake email addresses that sign up if you don’t put the proper precautions in place. That leaves many marketers wondering how to verify if an email address is real or fake. When working to achieve a valid email address list is, using the email verification tools can help. 

This article will break down email address verification tools and the email verifying process in more detail to give you a comprehensive overview. Stick around for all the details. 

How Do I Verify an Email Address Is Real?

If you’re wondering how to verify an email address is real, the best place to start is with email address verification tools, specifically ones that can do an initial confirmation email when someone signs up for your list. 

If you’re wondering what a confirmation email entails, you’ve probably gone through this process before yourself. You’ll see it happen when you receive the message that you were sent a “verify your email address code” to the email address you used in a signup form. You then input that code to verify you have access to that inbox. 

This is a pretty standard process in today’s email marketing space to ensure you build a healthy and active email list full of subscribers who really want to receive content from you. 

How Do I Manually Verify an Email Address?

While tools are great, they do require a monetary investment in most instances. That leads many to wonder if there are manual processes to verify an email list. There are ways to do so, but just keep in mind this is pretty tedious and not scalable if you’re building an email list with hundreds or thousands of subscribers. 

The most common manual verification method is by sending an email to the email address in question. Ideally, you want to do this from an account that isn’t on your business domain to avoid the implications of email bounces. 

When you send the email to the subscriber, you would then wait a couple of minutes to see if you get any messages back, like “server can’t be accessed,” which would show that the inbox is inactive and that you are possibly dealing with a fake email address. 

Can You Validate an Email Address Without Sending an Email?

Some manual methods and tools can verify email addresses without sending emails. Ideally, you would want to invest in tools to simplify the process, but the next section will break both processes down so you know how it works. 

How Do I Verify an Email Address Before Sending an Email?

To manually verify an email address before sending an email, you would typically go through some technical processes like IP address lookups, server pings, and running DNS records. These can be done through tools like MXToolbox or PuTTY for Telnet. 

While manual methods like these can work, it’s a pretty technical process. Just like sending individual emails to subscribers to see if it bounces, it simply isn’t a scalable solution that serious business owners or marketers can deploy while managing all their other operations. 

Instead, the best option is to go with a tool called a bulk email verifier. Bulk email verification tools can run all the previously mentioned processes, like pinging servers and looking up IP addresses in the background. Plus, they can give you results in a matter of seconds or minutes. It’s simply a much easier and better option for long-term results. 

Is There a Tool to Check Whether an Email Address Exists?

You might also wonder if there’s an email address tracker available online or ways to check email addresses for spam before adding subscribers to your list. There are several free or cheap email address checker tools online, like Email Checker or Email Hippo, that claim to be able to verify valid email addresses.

While these tools do work, they may not be the most accurate solution since they don’t go through every possible process to verify that an email address is valid, active, and not a spam trap. Plus, they often have limitations on how many emails you can check at a time. 

Instead, a better option is to go for premium tools like AudiencePoint’s email insight software that will help you achieve accurate, reliable, and long-term results. 

How AudiencePoint Can Help You Verify Email Addresses In Bulk

AudiencePoint is a comprehensive email insight software that is designed to collect data from your subscribers and provide actionable insights that help you boost the engagement and deliverability of your campaigns and avoid spam traps.

AudiencePoint’s email verification solution is able to provide better results because several layers of data and checks can be done for subscribers on your email list. 

First off, AudiencePoint solutoins are powered by our second-party data pool which tracks 1.7 trillion data signals weekly. The insights we provide from our data pool help you understand how subscribers interact with content and identify if an account is a spam trap or dormant. This helps you quickly clean up your list by getting rid of invalid email addresses.

Additionally, AudiencePoint’s tool ListFit can track subscriber activity to determine when subscribers must be re-engaged and any dormant addresses that should be suppressed. 

On top of all of that, our software also helps you boost engagement rates through send time optimization, real-time metrics, helping you segment your list, and much more. It also easily integrates with all major email service providers, so you can quickly start working on improving existing campaigns. 

Contact us today to learn more about how AudiencePoint can help you validate email addresses and improve your sender reputation.