How Email Verification Works: The Ultimate Guide

May 16, 2022

Following the creation of your email lead list, email verification is one of the most critical phases in any email marketing campaign. If you don't verify your emails - all the hard work you put into your email marketing campaign essentially becomes worthless.

email verification guide

Now you, along with many others, might be scared of your email marketing efforts being in vain due to not being able to verify your email list. This is why, in this article, we will discuss the following:

So, if you’re interested, keep reading.

What Is Email Verification?

Email verification is when the validity of an email address is authenticated, which increases the likelihood that it corresponds to an actual human being (not a bot or spam account). It aims to confirm that the sent email is received and interacted with by an actual human with a valid email address.

Email verification tools are desktop apps or web services (both software-as-a-service and addons) that help advertisers and sales staff to confirm the existence, functionality, and validity of a specific email address or a group of email addresses.

verifying mails

Often, these email verification tools are available as online services because they may be used at any time, from any location, and on any piece of equipment. They don't necessitate any more resources save internet access, and the developer and distributor of the service can easily support and upgrade them. However, the most important reason is that you can use many stable servers for authentication rather than running the procedure through a personal IP address.

Why You Should Use Email Verification Tools

There are several reasons why you need to verify emails. These are why email verification is of paramount importance & why ignoring this procedure can lead to significant email marketing issues that will take a long time to fix.

Keeps Your Email List Updated

There are a lot of invalid emails. This occurs as a result of a variety of extrinsic factors. A lot of the time, it's because people move jobs and their business email addresses, which you have on file, go inactive. If you don't authenticate your email lists regularly, your average bounce rate will increase tenfold in a year, and this will lead to a poor sender reputation. Ideally, you should verify your email list once every two months.

Lowers Hard Bounces

A hard bounce occurs when an email is returned to the sender because the receiver does not exist or if the email address is invalid. High bounce rates are frequently associated with spammers, so email service providers (ESPs) don't like them.

hard bounce
From Email Academy

Your sender's reputation suffers as your bounce rate rises. Your account will be blocked once it reaches a specific cut-off point.

Greatly Improves Deliverability Rates

As you use an email validator to block out invalid email addresses, you can be confident that the remaining ones can receive emails, ensuring that your messages make it to their intended destination. As a result, the deliverability of your emails remains good. This saves money on email sending while also preserving your sender's reputation.

It Sustains Your Sender Reputation

A variety of factors influence your sender's reputation. Bounce rate and deliverability have previously been highlighted. Still, there are also spam report rates and sender behaviors to consider (this is why it's essential to keep your email accounts warm). Regularly implementing email verification services in your email marketing campaign will help you maintain a good sender reputation and stay off blacklists.

Types Of Problematic Emails

Fake Email Addresses

Fake or incorrect email addresses are always a danger with sign-up forms. Anyone who wants to use your offer but doesn't intend to list their email address can fill out your form with a fake one. People in a rush may make a mistake on the form, rendering the address invalid. Furthermore, spambots could use spam trap email addresses to sign up.

Spam Traps

Many email verification services pretend to be able to eliminate or at least lower the amount of spam trap emails in your list, albeit this is not always the case. This is commonly accomplished by comparing the address to a list of known spam traps or potentially harmful IP addresses.

spam

Spam traps might appear as live email addresses that do not bounce. Although your list was obtained through inbound, there's a chance it contains spam traps.

Spam traps are sometimes built from addresses that are now inactive and have been seized by the email service provider as a manner of regulating corporate sender list cleanliness. Emailing them will harm your domain's reputation and its capacity to deliver emails.

Catch-All Addresses

Certain domains are configured to allow any email aliases. For instance, a business may forward all emails sent to incorrect addresses to "[email protected]," ensuring that no incoming leads are lost. A catch-all account is what it's called.

If you want your emails to be opened, [email protected] is probably not the place to send them. As a result, many email verification systems keep track of domains that utilize catch-all accounts in case-specific senders want to handle them accordingly.

Inactive Email Addresses

People often change their jobs or the firms they work for regularly. Furthermore, people frequently leave or fail to monitor personal email addresses. They might have been an email address devoted to email signup applications.

However, if the server still lists these addresses as genuine, email verification tools will miss them. You'll need to keep track of your customers' activity levels for this. It's preferable to remove subscribers from your list if it becomes evident that they're unlikely to participate again.

Before eliminating inactive subscribers, you might undertake a renewal email campaign if you have a good reputation. So if the address appears to be authentic, they should be eliminated if they don't react to your campaign. The danger of potentially removing a subscriber who might interact in the future is far exceeded by the risk of damaging your sender's reputation if you maintain them.

Disposable Addresses

Some users may use a throwaway email address to sign up for your offer. A good email verification tool should detect these types of throwaway addresses.

Role-Based Emails

Since role-based emails are easier to recognize if you have a company's URL, spammers frequently target them. Email addresses may be harvested by email aggregators, added to subscriber lists, and then sold to marketers. Multiple people commonly use these emails, so it's hard to know who signed up for the email list.

Forwarding to role-based accounts raises spam report rates and will undoubtedly harm your sender's reputation. Thus many email verification programs will flag them as potentially dangerous, even if they are legitimate.

How Email Verification Tools Work

How email verification tools function has a lot of technical subtleties. The central concept is that each email tester verifies emails using the developers' algorithms. For instance, to ensure optimum accuracy, an email verification tool should at least go through these five steps:

Syntax Check

When you send a professional email, you probably make sure that every word is written correctly and that your grammar is flawless. The same can be done using an email verification service. Syntax checkers search for the following things:

  • User name - Any combination of letters, numbers, and authorized symbols can be used as a user name.
  • Second Level Domain - The second level domain typically carries the domain's owner's business name or email provider's name.
  • Top-Level Domain - The.com,.org,.edu, and other top-level domains that show in the last section of your email address, are known as top-level domains.

Domain Check

After the @ sign, a domain name appears, indicating whichever domain the email address belongs to. The domain name gmail.com is used in [email protected], for example. Email verification services examine if the domain is spelled correctly and if the website and domain are legitimate and operational.

domain
Source: pngaaa

This check is necessary for a straightforward reason - websites, like email addresses associated with them, expire. Some businesses exit the market, while others switch to a new domain and produce new emails for that site.

Catch-All Check

An email verifier also determines whether the email is from a catch-all domain. A catch-all domain is a kind of domain that is configured to receive email even though the relevant section of the email contains nonsense.

The domain name aquaman.com, for example, is a catch-all. You may type in [email protected] and receive an email address that will accept messages while being non-existent and arbitrary. All email addresses linked with this domain name will receive mail - however, because catch-all emails are frequently used to avoid unwanted mail, they may result in hard bounces.

A reputable bulk email validator (or even a single email verifier) analyzes the domain name for catch-all status and alerts you to assist prevent bounces. If you notice that a verified email address has been designated as a catch-all/unverifiable, you may deliver texts to it at your own risk or remove it from the list entirely to only send to authentic email addresses.

MX Record Check

An MX record basically identifies the mail server that accepts emails on behalf of a given domain. It's a more complicated method of detecting spam emails. This function verifies that the email address's mail exchange entry is a real, registered, and maintained domain name that can be visited online.

An email verification system must include an MX record check. There are several more complex specifics about this process, but the essence is that an email verifier must use an MX record check to produce accurate results.

SMTP Authentication

An email verifier performs this test by sending a ping to an email address to check whether it is ready to receive and respond to emails.

SMTP authentication

If the request is delivered to the receivers' email address and they respond, the email is categorized as active, and you can securely send genuine emails to it. SMTP authentication is another name for this.

Things To Look For In An Email Verification Tool

Now let us consider some suggestions on how to select an ideal verification tool and what it should include now that we've established what an email verification tool is, why we need to validate emails, and how one works.

  • Scalability – Your email verification tool should be able to validate both single and huge email addresses. Even while verifying larger email lists takes up more time, it can still be done in under a minute.
  • Online Service – An online email verifier that works as SaaS is the best alternative. It doesn't use any of your desktop resources, can be viewed from any platform, and the verification system doesn't use your own IP (instead, it utilizes the service's IPs, which function much better).
  • Corporate And Personal Email Addresses – Your email verification tools should be able to check both corporate email addresses on the firm's domain as well as personal email account addresses on open email services (such as Gmail & Yahoo).
  • Integrations — These are crucial elements because email verification is used as part of the email campaign process, and it's beneficial to have your email verification tool connected to or incorporated with other modules like email toolkits (such as email sending, email generating & email list management tools).
  • Multiple Verification Procedures – You can't rely on just one verification system. Your email verifier should let you validate emails using a variety of authentication techniques, such as syntax checking, domain checking, and SMTP authentication.

Conclusion

Email verification is exceedingly simple and equally important. Although it might be very easily overlooked, email verification is a deciding factor when it comes to ensuring that your email marketing campaign succeeds. If you follow the steps provided in this article, your email list will likely contain authentic addresses, and your sender's reputation won’t be hampered.

verifybee
From VerifyBee

Look no further if you’re looking for an all-in-one email verification tool. VerifyBee is an integrated email verification tool that includes syntax checks, MX checks, SMTP authentication, and domain checks. Afterward, VerifyBee also provides you with an in-depth report of your email list.

Get Started For Free Today.

September 15, 2022
How to Avoid Spam Traps and Protect Your Sender Reputation in 2022

Building an email list from scratch takes a lot of effort and time. Nothing is more frustrating than discovering that spam traps have infiltrated your email address. It is not unusual for spam traps to occur even if you follow email best practices. But if you communicate with your subscribers with the best intentions, care […]

Read More
July 1, 2022
How To Ping An Email Address To Validate It

Do you ever wonder whether an email address is a legitimate or a false email address when it bounces back? Probably the easiest method to handle this is to ping an email address, and in this article, we will demonstrate how to ping and validate an email address. Validating emails by pinging different addresses is […]

Read More
June 29, 2022
The Best Email Services To Not Ask for Phone Verification

With everything becoming tech-based around us, it only makes sense that we turn to the internet for required services and needs. However, that is also when we truly feel the importance of "Emails." Today, an email account is the one thing that can help you sign up for any service or platform. It is one […]

Read More
May 16, 2022
How Email Verification Works: The Ultimate Guide

Following the creation of your email lead list, email verification is one of the most critical phases in any email marketing campaign. If you don't verify your emails - all the hard work you put into your email marketing campaign essentially becomes worthless. Now you, along with many others, might be scared of your email […]

Read More
envelope-ophoneinstagramgraduation-hatstorephone-handsetchart-barseartharrow-right