What’s the best way to check if an email exists? If you’re sending out mass email messages you might want to check if those emails exist or not. Otherwise, your email server might be blacklisted and your email campaign might fail.
When you are launching email marketing campaigns, you need not only to prepare message content but to prepare your contact list. Email address validity check is an important step in this process, which will take only a few minutes for you, but bring huge value to the
campaign results.
So, how to check the validity of an email address? Learn the details in our article.
What Is Email Verification And Why Is Email Verification Important?
Verification is the process that implies checking the validity of an email address. Email boxes aren’t everlasting: some become abandoned or deleted, some are unavailable, and some are just fake. Sending anything to such addresses means wasting your time and resources, but it is not the only reason.
When you send the message to an invalid address, it will bounce, implying that it hadn’t been delivered. There are two types of bounces: hard and soft. A hard bounce means that there are some permanent issues that block the delivery, like a typo in the address. You need to avoid them, as a high bounce rate will negatively affect your sender’s reputation, and you risk being marked as a spammer. Soft bounces happen when the issue is temporary, e.g., the server is down or the recipient mailbox is full.
Your sender’s reputation is directly connected to your delivery rates. Spam complaints, high bounce rates, and messages sent to spam traps will make you look like a spammer. Eventually, your future campaign won’t pass spam filters and end in spam folders. In such a case, your only solution will be to create a new online mailbox and start all over again, which means additional expenses and small campaign volumes.
Actionable methods to verify emails in 2022
So, how to check the validity of an email? The majority of the methods include using a special tool known as an online email verifier that will do the work for you. Here are the main examples of ways to check email addresses for validity.
1. Email Domain Existence
Every mailbox is associated with a certain domain, but they have a tendency to expire, or the business that owns it moves on to other names. Hence, there is always a possibility that an address in your mailing list might belong to the inactive domain and hence, it would bounce.
Checking that an email domain exists is quite easy. Simply open a browser and input it in the address bar. If you get a webpage, then the domain exists. If the domain doesn’t exist you will get a message like “This site can’t be reached”.
Additionally, you can go to one of the online domain providers to do a domain search, or you can access the online WHOIS service. Input the domain name there and the service will be checking the email domain.
A more advanced technique would be using a tool like ping to check if the domain exists. Here’s how it works:
2. Email Syntax Check
A single typo might lead to a bounce, which is always the result you would want to avoid. Syntax check implies that the spelling in every recipient’s address is examined, namely if there are any restricted symbols, if allowed symbols are placed correctly, etc.
An email address is composed of two parts:
- the prefix (part before the @ character)
- the domain
According to the standards that define valid email characters, here are the characters accepted in the prefix part of the email:
- uppercase and lowercase Latin letters
AtoZandatoz - digits
0to9 - printable characters
!#$%&'*+-/=?^_`{|}~ - dot
., provided that it is not the first or last character and provided also that it does not appear consecutively (e.g.,[email protected]is not allowed).
3. Connect to the SMTP Server
This type of verification implies that a tool sends a ping to a user’s mailbox without actually sending a newsletter. If the ping generates the reply, it means that the address is existing, active, and ready to receive your newsletter.
4. DSN/MX Record Check
MX stands for mail exchange and shows how your messages will be routed according to SMTP. During this check, the tool can figure out if the mailing server in question responds correctly and won’t bounce back your messages.
5. Sending Test Messages From Different Addresses
It is the simplest, but not very efficient when speaking about how to verify if an email is valid. You can just send a test message to the required address and see if you get a notification that your message was delivered or not. However, it would be wise to choose this method if you have a really small mailing list because manually checking hundreds or even thousands of contacts would be unreal.
Amazon SES suppression list feature
The marketing tool provided by Amazon, named Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), provides a special feature where you can create your own suppression list or a list of the addresses you want to block. The solution also offers a global suppression list with contacts Amazon considers invalid.
Conclusion
Verification is an important step in your mailing list management. We hope this article helped you to understand how to verify if an email is valid and why it is such a big deal.
