How to Check if an Email is Valid?

Your next outreach campaign or cold email is coming up. You don’t want it to land on deaf ears, right? Much worse is, if there are no ears there to begin with. Ensuring that the recipient email addresses are valid should be your first step! An invalid email can trigger a chain reaction which ultimately hurts the results of your email campaign:

• Bounced Messages: Emails sent to invalid addresses will bounce back, affecting your sender reputation and filling up your inbox with bounce-notifications in the process.
• Reduced Deliverability: Reduced sender reputation due to high bounce rates can cause email providers to flag your domain as suspicious, reducing overall deliverability.
• Wasted Resources: Precious time and money spent on creating and sending emails are wasted when messages do not reach the intended recipients.

To make sure your campaign is going in the right direction, we’ve brought together some must-use advice. A free tool, a process to follow, and some optional paid (discounted!) tools for the extra mile:

• Using Mailmeteor’s Free Email Checker
• Verifying Email Addresses
  • Proper Email Format & Syntax
  • Check for Disposable Email Addresses
  • Did You Google the Email?
  • Verify the Domain & MX Records
• Professional Tools for Email Verification

So let’s jump in,

Using Mailmeteor’s Free Email Checker

Mailmeteor offers a free Email Checker tool which allows users to easily verify the validity of any email address. With a user-friendly interface, you can quickly ensure that the email addresses you have in your mailing list are accurate and active, improving your campaigns and reducing bounce rates in the process.

Here is how you can use it:

1. Open Mailmeteor’s Email Checker.
2. Enter the email address you wish to verify; we are going to use one of our team member’s email as an example.
3. Click the “Verify” button.
4. Wait for the tool to do its magic (magic in 2 seconds).

Done! Mailmeteor makes sure that the email address matches proper syntax, and the domain has valid MX records ready to receive your emails!

Once you have successfully verified the email addresses in your mailing list, you should go ahead and use Mailmeteor to send personalized emails in bulk to your recipients.

What if you entered an invalid email address? I can already tell you that, if you’re trying to cold email Mailmeteor’s CEO using ceo@mailmeteor, it won’t get you anywhere:

But there is a logic behind trying ceo@mailmeteor. and here’s where it comes from:

Verifying Email Addresses

While automated tools do make the process easier and faster, you should know some manual methods for verifying email addresses as well. We will start with the absolute basics and move on to more technical methods.

Proper Email Format & Syntax

The first and most fundamental knowledge for verifying an email address is to ensure that it adheres to proper email format and syntax. An email address typically consists of three parts:

• The Local Part: This is the text before the @ symbol. It should contain alphanumeric characters and may include simple special characters like dots, underscores, and hyphens.
• The “@” Symbol: Acting as a separation between the local and domain parts.
• The Domain Part: Which comes after the @ symbol. It should consist of a valid domain name followed by a TLD (Top-Level Domain) such as .com, .org, or .net.

For example, a correct email format would be “[email protected]”. Common errors to look out for include multiple consecutive dots, spaces, or missing symbols, any of which would render an email address invalid. You should also check the domain itself; if it points to a website that does not really exist, odds are that the email does not exist either. However, it is still possible to have an email address for a domain name without actually creating a website for it, which we will discuss when we verify MX records.

Check for Disposable Email Addresses

Disposable email services allow users to create temporary email addresses that expire after a short period or after a single use, making them a common choice for users interested in avoiding spam or maintaining anonymity. While they serve legitimate privacy needs, their nature can result in high bounce rates and poor engagement metrics for your campaigns, especially since any delivered emails will likely end up in an abandoned mailbox.

It is important to set up automatic filters for the detection of temporary email addresses in your mailing list. Some of the most common temporary email services are: 10MinuteMail.com, Mailinator.com, YOPmail.com, etc. Check out this repository of disposable email domains for a list of over 3000 such domain names.

Did You Google the Email?

A quick way to manually verify an email address is to simply Google it. This method can help you determine if the email address has a web presence or is associated with someone particular. For instance, professional email addresses often appear on company websites or LinkedIn profiles; by searching for the email address online, you can validate its legitimacy and potentially uncover valuable context about the sender. Take this advice with a pinch of salt though, as many legitimate email addresses may not appear in search results, especially if they belong to private individuals or businesses who do not take part in online activities.

Verify the Domain & MX Records

Mailmeteor’s Free Email Check does this automatically, but if you wish to do so manually, keep on reading! MX records are DNS entries that specify which mail servers will be responsible for receiving emails on behalf of a domain. By verifying these records, you can confirm that the domain is configured to accept emails. There are online tools available that allow you to look up MX records for a domain. MxToolbox is one such tool that lets you look up these records for free. If the domain lacks MX records, this is an absolute red flag indicating that the email address may not exist.

Professional Tools for Email Verification

While the Mailmeteor Email Checker does work for emails one at a time, it is not uncommon to have a mailing list with hundreds if not thousands of contacts. In such cases, you should use a professional email verification & validation service. Mailmeteor has partnered with industry leaders such as Bouncer, Clearout, Neverbounce, and Zerobounce to provide discounts to our users. All these tools offer professional email verification services which let you validate email lists in bulk instead of one at a time. Some of them also provide API access for users who wish to integrate email verification functionality into their own applications.

You can grab your discount for these premium tools via the partners page on your Mailmeteor Dashboard.