What Is Email Verification And How to Check If an Email is Valid: 5 Methods

Email marketing is an efficient tool for any marketer. However, to get the most out of any email campaign, you need to ensure the validity of your email base. 

This article will explain why email verification is necessary and how to test if an email is valid through an email address verifier.

What Is Email Verification?

Email verification is a process of verifying if an email address exists and is currently working (source).

Basically, you are trying to know if an email is valid.

You may ask: why do I need email verification? The thing is that this process helps you reduce the number of invalid emails and bounce rate (a percentage of emails that haven’t reached the recipient). 

A high bounce rate is usually regarded as a market of spammers, and your email service provider may punish and blacklist you.

How Can You Check Email Address Validity?

There are a few ways you can test email validity.

Method 1: Syntax Check

Syntax check is used to check the correctness of email addresses for spelling errors, extra spaces, commas, dots, etc. It is the simplest way to remove incorrect emails.

Method 2: Domain Record Check

Another checking method is to test the domain to which the email address belongs. 

Here, you can kill two birds with one stone: firstly, you check if the domain and its website actually exist and operate; secondly, you check if the domain name is spelled correctly.

Method 3: Server Ping

This method is based on SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). It works the following way: your email verifying software server sends a request to an email address to see if it responds. 

In the positive outcome, the server receives a confirmation that this email address is active and can receive email messages successfully.

Method 4: Verification Email

You might also try to send a verification email with a validation link to your list. It is pretty straightforward: you just ask users to сonfirm the email address. 

However, it might not work on huge volumes and might even damage your sender’s reputation if a lot of those emails aren’t valid.

Method 5: Catch-all Check

Catch-all domains are the type of domains that can create some problems for your sender’s reputation.

They are designed to accept all emails directed to them, even if no certain email address is created.

For example, anyone can write a gibberish email address, add the catch-all domain name, and such an email will be accepted. At the same time, sending messages to these emails might affect your hard bounces.

To Sum Up

A valid email test is an essential practice in email marketing. Thankfully, there are a lot of software solutions on the market that can help you figure out how to check if an email is valid seamlessly and quickly.