Methods to Accurately Check Email Addresses

As a business entity, you need accurate and valid contact data for your customers or prospects. However, there are so many potential problems with email addresses, such as typos, outdated addresses, and fake or spam trap accounts, so it’s critical to validate them before sending emails.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about properly verifying email addresses the right way, including:

• The importance of email verification
• Best practices for confirmation emails
• Using email validation APIs
• Thing to avoid
• Additional email verification tips
• The future of email validation

At the end of it, you’ll have the knowledge required to see yourself through contact lists, confirming new signups and creating systems so that you always have accurate email records. Let’s get started!

The Importance of Email Verification: What is a Valid Email Address?

Both engagement and deliverability require validating an email address. Using an email validator API helps identify invalid addresses before sending, reducing bounce rates and protecting your sender’s reputation. On the deliverability side, bouncing emails can damage the sender’s reputation with the major ISPs (like Gmail or Yahoo). They interpret high bounce rates as a signal that you are a spammer and should be blacklisted.

Also, invalid or old email addresses on your list inflate your subscriber count with contacts who will never actually engage. This distorts the metrics and dictates decisions on how frequently to send your email or what content to put in the email.

On the engagement side, reaching the inbox is only half the battle – you want recipients to open and click on your emails. However, fake and spam trap accounts will never engage, while bad addresses result in bounces and abuse reports.

By filtering out invalid emails, you are only marketing to genuinely interested contacts who are very likely to read and engage with your content. This helps improve all marketing metrics such as open, click through, and conversion rates.

Overall, email address validation provides huge benefits for deliverability, sender reputation, and subscriber engagement.

Best Practice: Confirmation Emails

So, how do you check if an email address is valid? The gold standard for email verification is to use double opt-in confirmation emails. This means sending new subscribers a confirmation email and requiring them to click a verification link before being added to your list.

Double opt-in confirmation emails have a number of advantages:

• Verifies the email address is valid and actively monitored
• Confirms the subscriber wants to receive your emails
• Prevents fake or spam trap accounts from entering your list
• Gives subscribers confidence in your legitimacy

The confirmation link should expire after a set period in case it ends up in the wrong inbox. Modern email solutions can automate this process, ensuring links remain valid and improving security. After confirming, send a quick welcome email to thank contacts for verifying and let them know what to expect from you in the future.

Apart from new subscribers, you may also want to periodically re-confirm existing contacts – for example, once a year. Set up a system to automatically send confirmation emails to contacts who haven’t engaged beyond a certain threshold over a set time.

This helps remove outdated or no longer interested contacts from your list. Just be sure to communicate clearly about the purpose of re-confirmation – you don’t want engaged subscribers to think you’re spam.

Using Email Validation APIs

While confirmation emails work well for subscribers, manually verifying every individual email address simply isn’t feasible. For this, using a dedicated email address validation API automates the process.

Email validation APIs tap into their own databases and advanced techniques to validate addresses in real-time. They can identify issues like:

• Syntax errors
• Disposable and temporary accounts
• Inactive or invalid domains
• Catch-all inboxes
• Spam traps and honey pots

The major benefit of email validation APIs is safely verifying addresses without actually sending emails. This avoids problems like spam complaints, bounces, or landing in the spam folder.

Email validation APIs also tend to be very accurate. They offer guaranteed validity periods and continuous updates as domains change hands or go out of business.

For best results, use email validation APIs to clean your list initially and follow up with periodic confirmation emails. This one-two punch allows you to identify and remove bad addresses while automatically confirming engaged recipients.

Also check: What Is C3PAO

What to Avoid: Broken SMTP Handshakes

On the flip side, one email verification method to avoid is something called a “broken SMTP handshake”. Here’s how it works:

Email sending is governed by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). If you send an email, your mail server does a ‘handshake’ with the recipient’s mail server.

This handshake guarantees that the recipient mail server will accept your message before it actually sends the content. The email is delivered once the content is accepted.

An intentionally interrupted SMTP session breaks this process. The recipient verifies the sending server, and then the sending server completes the initial handshake. Instead of sending the message body, however, it abruptly disconnects.

The idea is to validate the email address without sending anything, mimicking a connectivity problem with a regular SMTP session. However, this method has significant downsides:

• This can be seen as malicious behavior if done repeatedly
• Provides unreliable and inaccurate results
• Harms your sender’s reputation and IP reputation
• Triggers spam filters and greylisting countermeasures

A broken SMTP handshake may seem clever in theory but it will have a negative effect on your deliverability. It also does not confirm that the person wants to receive your emails in the first place. For this reason, it is strongly advisable to avoid this method of email verification.

Additional Tips for Verifying Email Addresses: How to Check if Email is Valid

Here are more best practices for maintaining clean and accurate email lists beyond confirmation emails and the Email Validation API.

Watch out for spam traps and honey pots. The purpose of these fake email accounts is to trap the spammers. You should never use bots to “harvest” emails from websites or purchase email lists as they always contain spamtrap addresses.

Identify shared or group accounts. You may encounter addresses used by a group of people, such as [email protected] or [email protected]. Such addresses can actually be misleading when it comes to engagement metrics, and in most cases should be removed from mailing lists.

Check engagement metrics. Review open and click rates from recent campaigns. Unengaged contacts may be abandoned or no longer interested. These are good candidates for re-confirmation.

Standardize addresses when possible. Gmail ignores periods in addresses, treating john.doe@ the same way as johndoe@. However, some providers see these as different accounts. Standardizing email formats improves accuracy.

Scrub lists against global spam lists. Major ISPs maintain public blacklists of known spam domains. Checking your lists against these helps uncover potential issues.

Following these tips, in addition to confirmation emails and email validation APIs, will help ensure your email program targets an engaged list of genuinely interested recipients.

The Future of Email Verification

Looking ahead, email validation technology will continue advancing to keep pace with changing subscriber habits and inbox provider best practices.

On the mailbox provider side, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others will likely expand automated protection against suspicious behavior. For legitimate senders, that means increased scrutiny and potential impacts on deliverability.

For subscribers, the rise of alias services like Apple’s Hide My Email and Mozilla Relay helps protect consumer privacy. However, this masked forwarding presents new challenges for senders seeking to validate email addresses.

The pace at which the global email landscape changes is speeding up rapidly. Foreign providers come and go quickly at the top level (.io, .tech, etc.), and even long-standing domains can change ownership overnight.

These trends indicate that we have to pay attention to email hygiene and verification. The systems you need as your subscriber list grows across geographies, languages, and inbox types are ones to confirm valid addresses at scale.

This will be based on technological automation of validation, not just at sign-up but also with ongoing monitoring to stay in step. As for machine learning algorithms, you may expect that they will also be used, probably increasingly so, to identify possible suspicious patterns.

Essentially, it boils down to the same things underneath, though: check if an email address is valid, confirm people’s consent, and get rid of dormant contacts. Following email verification best practices is important because your program will keep on engaging with the right audience as the tools and techniques evolve.

Conclusion

Having a clean, accurate email list is the foundation of email marketing success. Fortunately, email verification APIs and confirmation emails make it easy to verify addresses properly.

Broken SMTP handshakes are a dangerous technique that should be avoided. Instead, concentrate on writing excellent articles and keeping in touch with idea providers. This will help you follow the email verification best practices that are covered above.

Don’t forget quality over quantity when referring to email contacts. A smaller list of truly interested recipients will get you better results than a bloated one full of typos, fakes, and inactivity.

With these, investment should be made to keep data clean, confirm opt-ins, and maintain engagement time. By conquering these core aspects of email verification, your program is ready for deliverability, reputation, and, of course, success.