How to Verify Email Addresses: 7 Methods + 3 Tools

Creating a large email list is only one stage of executing a successful email marketing campaign. Once you have built a large email list, you need to divert your attention to verifying the email addresses to ensure high deliverability and a minimum bounce rate.

We will discuss different aspects of email verification and why it is important to check email validity to maximize the effectiveness and success of your email campaign.

Email Verification & Email Bounce Rates

Before we dive into the detailed steps to check whether an email address is valid, it is important to understand some basics about email verification and validation.

It is important to note that email verification is different from email validation. Verifying your email typically involves multiple steps, like domain and syntax checks. On the other hand, email validation is the final result that the user gets to know whether the email is valid or not.

Importance of Valid Email Addresses

Validating and verifying email addresses has numerous different advantages:

• Use an Updated Email List: People often change emails due to different reasons, such as changing jobs, completing an educational program, etc. Without email verification, you can have an outdated email list with a bunch of invalid email addresses.

• Improve Delivery Emails: valid email addresses ultimately means you will have a greater chance of reaching your target audience, leading to higher deliverability and better sender reputation.

• Minimize Bounce Rate: Sending emails to invalid addresses means your emails will bounce back, causing your bounce rate to increase. It can also result in making your emails marked as spam, so you should have a verified email list.

• Better Reputation: Less hard bounce rate and better deliverability have a positive impact on increasing the overall reputation of your email address.

Overview of Email Bounce Rates

The email bounce rate is the percentage of emails that are not delivered to the recipient's inboxes. There are two types of email bounce rates:

• Hard Bounce: It means the email cannot be delivered permanently. Hard bounces occur due to invalid email addresses, wrong domains, or banned email servers. A high hard bounce rate can significantly damage your email reputation.



• Soft Bounce: Soft bounces are the complete opposite of hard bounces. They happen when an email cannot be sent temporarily. Soft bounces typically occur due to server issues or the recipient's inbox being full. In terms of their impact on the email's reputation, soft bounces are less damaging than hard bounces, but they can still affect your deliverability in the long run.

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Relationship Between Email Address Validation & Bounce Rate

The process of verifying email addresses and bounce rates are closely related to each other. A primary reason for the high bounce rate is when you send emails to invalid email addresses. In such a situation, email verification is essential to remove the non-existent addresses and ensure you are sending emails only to actual users.

Other than reducing the hard bounce rate, email validation is also useful to minimize soft bounces by identifying temporary issues in email addresses, such as full inboxes.

So, it can be said that a strong and efficient email address verification process means less bounce rate and a better sender email reputation by cultivating trust with the internet service providers.

How to Check If an Email Address is Valid Without Sending an Email?

When it comes to learning the process of how to check if an email is valid, you should know about different methods to deal with a small email list as well as an extensive one.

1. When validating a small number of email addresses

If you are dealing with a small number of email addresses, you don't necessarily have to use an email verification tool. Instead, you can validate the email addresses manually by following these methods:

• Check the Email Address Syntax / Format

Examining the syntax or format of the email address is one of the quickest and most effective ways of validating an email address. In a valid email address, the prefix is located to the left of the @ symbol while the domain name is to the right of the @ symbol.

For example, abc@yahoo.com, yourname@gmail.com, and sales@engagelab.com are all examples of valid and verified email addresses.

• Add the Address to an Email and Hover Over

Another quick and unique way of checking an email's validity is by adding the address to a new email and hovering over it. If the email address is valid, it will show the recipient's name and display a picture when you are hovering over it. If there is no name and picture, there is a high chance that the email is invalid.

However, keep in mind that this is not a perfect method as the recipient's information might be hidden due to their privacy settings.



• Search the Email Address on the Internet

The internet is a vast place. You can find a lot of information about someone simply by searching their phone number or email address. So, when you are verifying email addresses, you should perform a search on the internet, especially Google and social media platforms, to see if the email is associated with a brand, business, or person.

Here's an example of top Google results when you search the email 'sales@engagelab.com' that shows the address belongs to a real and credible platform.



• Check the Email Domain's Age

Traditional domains like Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, etc, have significant credibility and reliability. However, if you notice that a recipient's email address has an unknown or new domain name, you should check its age through an online tool-Domain Age Check to check email validity.



• Password Recovery

The password recovery method is a popular and easy way of verifying email addresses. All you have to do is open the password recovery page of the relevant domain, such as Gmail, and enter the email address you are trying to verify.

If you get the password reset option, the email address is valid. Otherwise, the email service provider will give a message that the email address does not exist.

Keep in mind that password recovery is a time-consuming process. Hence, it is limited to a very small group of individual users. You cannot verify a large number of email addresses with this method.

2. How to Verify Your Email Addresses in Bulk?

While the methods discussed in the previous section are great for verifying and validating a small number of email addresses, the truth is they are not sufficient for medium or large-scale businesses that have a large email list.

Therefore, it is important to discuss two major methods that can help you verify your email addresses in bulk:

Perform an IP Address Lookup

A comprehensive IP address lookup is useful for verifying the validity of email addresses in bulk and also for getting important information about the IP address related to these email accounts. IP addresses are important in checking email address validity as they establish the legitimacy of a sender or recipient's email server.

Moreover, you get additional information related to the email's location, reputation, and overall chances of it being associated with spammy activities.

There is no one particular tool to conduct an IP address lookup, but one common one is MXToolBox. It is a user-friendly and efficient tool that can provide all the essential information you need about an IP address to determine whether the associated email address is a valid one.

Here are the simple steps involved in performing an IP address lookup:

• First of all, find the IP address linked with the recipient's address.
• Visit MXToolBox or any other IP lookup tool in your browser.
• Enter the IP address or email address. If multiple IP addresses show up, click on one of them for further analysis.

• Choose the Lookup IP option to get information about the associated IP address, including its location and linked domain.

Use Email Verifier Tools

Using email verifier tools to check email validity is the most efficient to maintain a clean and valid email list. It helps you save a lot of time and energy by automating the entire process. However, choosing the right email verification tool can be difficult because there are many different solutions available in the market that have their own pros, cons, and working processes.

The general working process of all email verifier tools is the same. You enter the email address in bulk, and the software or tool processes them as per their algorithm to determine their validity.

Best Email Validation Tools

Let's discuss the top 3 email validation tools available on the internet that can help you verify email address without sending email:

Emailable

Emailable is a popular email validation tool. Users can easily upload their email lists in different formats, such as CSV, Excel sheets, or text formats for verification purposes. Moreover, the platform has a user-friendly interface, so anyone can use it.

Other than bulk and real-time email verification processes, using Emailable is also useful to properly clean and organize your email list. It can go through your extensive list of email addresses and generate a thorough report within a few minutes.

ZeroBounce

ZeroBounce is another email verification tool that is known for its high accuracy, security, and user-friendliness. The primary focus of ZeroBounce is on cleaning up your email list to ensure high deliverability. These results are achieved through reliable email verification methods.

Bouncer

With a simple drag-and-drop interface, Bouncer has established itself as one of the most prominent names among email verification tools. The tool heavily promotes its capability of verifying up to 250k email addresses within a few minutes, all through its user-friendly interface.

Bouncer is also known for being powered by modern and reliable AI algorithms. These algorithms can interact with the SMTP servers to ensure you are getting quick and accurate results.

EngageLab: Combine Email Validation & Email Marketing

While there are several different methods and tools to verify email addresses, one key thing you can do is choose a tool that provides email validation and email marketing features under the same dashboard.

EngageLab , a comprehensive customer engagement platform, can help you in this regard. The platform has a powerful email delivery platform powered by a powerful API to ensure all of your emails are delivered with maximum accuracy quickly.

Moreover, EngageLab helps businesses minimize bounce rates by ensuring high delivery rates through content classification, high security, and filtering mechanisms.

Most importantly, you can add your extensive email list in EngageLab and also verify the emails through the powerful delivery response system.

• Login to your EngageLab account. You can easily add your email list to EngageLab by following these few simple steps.

Check Email Validity New Year Offer

• Access the Email option from the dashboard.



• Open Marketing & Audience and click on the Import Contacts button to add your email list.



• You can choose to upload a CSV file to upload the email addresses in bulk quickly, or you can also copy-paste the addresses.



Here's an example of an imported email list in EngageLab.

Once your email list is added and verified in EngageLab, you can enjoy several other email marketing functions within the platform, including:

• BIMI: Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) allows you to send personalized and customized emails to the clients with your brand logos while ensuring maximum compliance with DMARC protection. It is one of the many ways in which EngageLab ensures maximum email deliverability.

• A/B Testing: EngageLab supports A/B testing to ensure you are sending the best content to your email list to increase conversion. With EngageLab's email A/B testing features , you can significantly improve your email marketing efforts.

• Bulk Email Services: Running a successful email marketing campaign is all about sending emails to a large list of individuals without getting reported as spam. With EngageLab, you can easily send emails in bulk while also maintaining a high deliverability rate.

All in all, for a reliable, efficient and user-friendly platform for email address verification and successful email marketing, look no further than EngageLab.

Conclusion

The email verification process might seem like a difficult task at first. But the good thing is that there are a bunch of email verifier tools available that can help you validate emails in bulk within a few minutes. If you are dealing with a few email addresses, the process becomes even quicker and easier as you can verify them through manual methods.

Most importantly, you can also combine the email verification process with marketing efforts to save time and energy. This is possible with EngageLab, which is powered by modern technologies, APIs, and algorithms to help you maintain a clean list of valid email addresses and send engaging marketing emails to them.