The Definitive Guide to Email Verification for High Delivery Rate

 

Not all email addresses are active and legit. Some are used for spamming or malware. Some are hard to remember. And some are just invalid addresses or fake emails. For that reason, the email verification process is a necessary step all types of businesses must take before you launch your email marketing campaign. It helps them verify the authenticity of emails sent to their systems and can be used for authentication purposes or as a security measure. It is also helpful when dealing with automated services.

This article will explore why it is important to verify email addresses, the benefits of doing this process, and the best email verifiers to use for your business.

What is an Email Checker?

An email verification tool or email checker is an in-use solution for verifying whether or not an email address works or is a catchall or disposable email when sending emails. They can be hardware tools, software apps, or even services that run online updates across your business to confirm all users have active accounts. These methods are proven effective over the long term because they will quickly tell you if there is a problem with any email addresses in your contact lists so you can lessen your bounced emails and prevent them from hurting your sender reputation. Not only do these validation tools help with account verification, but they can also help with the process of getting started when you are launching email marketing .

Why Do You Need an Email Checker?

There are many reasons why you should need an email validation tool. In a nutshell, it helps you verify and delete duplicate emails to ensure that you have valid emails in your contact list. Plus, it ensures that all of your emails are sent to the right people and not to the wrong ones. This is especially important when dealing with automated services or other types of computer systems that may send out messages without human intervention. It also curbs the possibility of fraudulent emails being sent from your accounts which can be a big mess if you don’t have backups or your backups do not work properly.

When you use an email checker, you can get to enjoy the following benefits:

Keep Your Data Updated

If there are any issues with the data in your email list, then an email verifier can help you stay up-to-date. It is crucial for keeping your contact lists accurately updated and effective especially if you are running a business that relies on services like digital marketing campaigns or even transactional apps. You need to make sure your customers are getting the information they need and should receive. If any of them end up complaining about receiving fake messages because their address was likely already compromised, then you are going to have some issues running through all of those back-end systems.

Boost Email Deliverability Rate

An email verifier is helpful in boosting your email deliverability rate by ensuring that all the email addresses you have in your mailing lists are active and valid. Based on statistics, 60% of consumers have intentionally provided incorrect email addresses when signing up. Having inactive and invalid emails can result in a high bounce rate which negatively affects your campaign. Preventing yourself from sending emails to temporary email addresses will also improve your email deliverability rate.  Additionally, it tells you if an email has been opened and the status of replies. By adding an email verifier to your existing programs, you will find out virtually all issues in getting un-delivered messages.

Maintain your Domain Reputation

Email checker verifies not just your subscribers’ email addresses but also the authenticity of your domain name. Domain reputation plays a vital role in the success of your email campaign. Your email would not land in the recipient’s inbox if you have a low sender score. Sender reputation is an essential metric that email service providers such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook take into consideration to ensure that their users would not receive fraudulent and malicious emails. If you don’t maintain your domain reputation, your emails might be blocked by spam filters and spam traps or would be marked as “spam” by email service providers.

Who Should Use an Email Checker?

Ultimately, an email checker should be used by email marketers. Whether you are using it for sending emails to your email list or sending out cold email outreach, an email checker can help email marketers ensure you maintain your sender reputation and email delivery rate, and avoid email blacklist from classifying them as being sent out from spammers. But this can also be used by any type of profession or industry that is using emails as a form of communication such as a SaaS or eCommerce website to make sure 2FA and other automated emails are properly delivered. It can also be helpful for companies with many subscribers and vendors because there could potentially be a lot of duplicate information in your database if somebody got their contact information wrong.

Businesses that use email campaigns will benefit from having an email verifier in their campaign. There are tools such as DMARC and DKIM to encrypt the communication between sender and recipient. However, this cannot mislead individuals with fake or bad identities (not real subscribers). By placing an email verifier on top of conventional verification techniques — like TLS (encryption), SPF (Sender Policy Framework), and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) — allows them to verify the authenticity of their domain which prevents unsolicited emails go to spam. Your email provider is always particular about your domain reputation.

How Does an Email Checker Work?

The email verification tool sends a link to the subscriber’s domain which redirects them to an interactive web page where they can fill out some information so that the provider could verify their identity. The address will be verified by check-marking DKADS compliant domains and also checking for delivered emails if through SPF.

The process involved in this verification is called dynamic validation which checks the validity of a subscriber’s email address against various sources (both internal and external data). Then, it will check everything from the domain name service (DNS) for available information about an organization’s identity including the availability of web pages with PHI standards-compliant privacy policies found on WHOIS records.

In the event that a mail server serves up email to an address where it does not reside, then users will receive emails that denied delivery. This causes dissatisfied recipients to stop sending their emails through an environment controlled by provider systems. This form of validation can use both “domain validated SPF” and domain data in determining correspondence with specific individual email addresses using domain keys. Additional criteria considered when validating serial numbers include the presence of a DKIM record in DNS. With domain validated SPF, an organization is able to use relevant domains when communicating with customers.

Syntax Validation

Syntax validation is another form of email verification that reads information from incoming emails in a manner specific to DKIM and SPF standards. It is a more complicated process of verifying an email address. It utilizes special software to identify the presence and characteristics of multiple SPF records that can be made available by domains.

In this process, the information is then used as part of the verification process. It provides contextual behavior for message delivery from DKIM-based mail servers to indicate whether recipients should receive messages from a certain mailbox or not.

Blacklist Check

Blacklists are a list of IP addresses that email senders should not use for sending emails. For example, mail sent from a server with the wrong “reverse DNS” (that is if it was configured improperly or misconfigured) will never connect. In addition to making sure one’s own domain resolves correctly in SPF/DKIM signatures and allows outgoing messages, blacklist verification adds another layer of security by ensuring there are no other senders claiming to have the same domain. The list of Blacklist IP addresses is maintained by some organizations that enable one or both SPF and DKIM validation in their own tools, mailing lists, etc.

Domain Record Check

A DKIM/SPF domain record check is meant to help SPF and DKIM verifiability in the same way that a DNS check is done for any kind of hostname record. It ensures that the domain contains a valid SPF record. It is an automated process that verifies the presence of a valid DKIM/SPF record with your organization.

Another benefit of it is that it checks the MX record for a domain name to determine if the domain exists. The MX record is used by ICANN to manage the domain names, which are given to companies or individuals who own them. If someone has attempted to take over or improperly use a name, that individual’s information can be found in these records.

Email Ping

For email clients, a ping can be used to see if the connection from an outgoing mail relay is working. In other words, it checks if your domain name resolves correctly or not when sending mail out through your relay. Usually, this check needs to happen only once every 10 minutes but some organizations require more frequent testing of their message traffic sent through their service providers’ infrastructure in order for them to confirm that they are properly receiving SMTP responses based on their DKIM and/or SPF policy.

3 Types of Email Checker

Many people are using email verification tools to make sure that the person they are contacting is the intended recipient. These can be classified into three types.

Bulk Verification Tools

Bulk verification tools are specialized email verification services that let recipients send bulk emails to a large number of target destinations at the same time. These generators run out of network capacity and deliver an average of 100,000-1MM messages in a single day while making use of parallel processing hardware configurations. It has been regarded as a kinder form of email authentication because they exemplify “controlled cross-correlation” instead of simply querying the target to determine if someone has valid accounts.

Real-Time Verification Tools

Real-time email verification tools, also known as SNORT (Survey and Network Intrusion Response Tool), work in real-time to verify that domain accounts communicate with valid email domains and not banned users. These are much more accurate than bulk methods. They scan all incoming SMTP messages received through a specific IP address or domain for real-time changes that might warn you if there’s been abuse on the side of the recipient. Like Bulk verification, these run out of network capacity and deliver 200M messages per day via parallel processing hardware configuration while making use of parallel TCP/IP technology.

Automated Verification Tools

Automated verification tools perform automated cross-correlation (A/C) and volumetric scanning performance criteria against mailboxes of the email domains. They manage themselves generally in order to flag users that represent risks for spamming or reputation loss. They help organizations filter out unwanted emails from their own network which is much more bearable than phishing threats because it does not require communications between sending and recipients. They also do a lot “behind the scenes” to take care of other troubles like resolving invalid credentials and identifying inconsistencies in mailbox content.

In addition, they work like business analytics and data mining software because they run the same algorithm over a large number of messages and store new information on each one. The biggest problem with these AVs is that their results are generally “heuristic” — meaning every IP address looks different to them. This problem can be challenging for end-users who may find some legitimate messages rejected as spam.

Factors to Consider When Choosing An Email Checker

Email verification tools are incredibly useful in making sure that all the email addresses in your contact lists are valid, active, and authentic. But when choosing an email verification tool, you should consider the following factors in order to select the most suitable tool for your team.

Online Service

Online service allows email verification for a variety of different scenarios. It can be used to verify the identity of an individual while also verifying a company’s email address. Generally, it provides centralized platform solutions that an internal network can use to perform assessment activities similar to those that cloud-operated mail verification tools perform. But the main reason why you should look at the online service of your preferred email checker is to ensure that it works like a SaaS (software-as-a-service) so there’s no need for an installation that would occupy your computer storage just for you to be able to use it. By being able to access it to any browser, you can work anytime and anywhere using any device. On top of that, you do not need to use your own IP address for the verification process.

Various Verification Processes

Your email verifier should allow you to verify emails by running several validation methods such as syntax check, domain check, and email server ping. For example, domain-based Sender ID ( which uses email addresses found on domain registries to filter messages) is widely used across domains. The level of success varies depending on how well it has been implemented or if sites have good records for legitimate sending activities. Yet other options exist, including Whitelists and Blacklists. These advanced types of sender ID services attempt to identify and filter out false positives and limit the number of incorrect messages that users receive.

Scalability

Besides email verification tool usability, scalability is an important factor to consider when choosing the right provider. Your ease of use should depend on how quickly you would like your tools to be updated in reaction to changes in their environment. It is a factor that one should be concerned about when picking the right email verification software.

Integrations and API

With many methods of verification, it can be difficult to manage data and messages across multiple platforms. Email verifier services make integration effortless by providing an API that enables others to write applications on top of the tools you choose. Integration with other software is especially convenient when running a list-based campaign. These types are often better suited for more detailed validation without exposing anyone’s personal information or attachments via email messages.

If no API option is available, it is at least important to choose a email verifier that integrates with Google Sheet as Google Sheet’s API allows it to integrate with almost any other CRM or marketing automation tools you have.

Plus, a real-time email verification API lets you automatically check if there are any invalid email addresses. It allows you to correct email typos quickly. It also prevents invalid emails or shared addresses from getting into your list that lowers the quality of your email list. Automated integrations help you eliminate mistyped, fake, and duplicated emails.

My Recommended Email Verification Tools

Email validation is an important process that an email marketer like you should include in your email marketing strategy. Thankfully, there are a lot of email verification tools available in the market nowadays. However, not all of them can give you the best features that you need.

In order to help you pick the right one that is best suited for your business, below are some of my recommended tools you can choose to help you get started.

Truemail 

Truemail allows a real-time verification of email addresses in your contact. You can easily verify your existing email list in bulk to clear out any bad emails. They have single verify, bulk verify as well as API and integrations. Their API is a verify and get result action which saves you tasks and zaps via your automation software to get valid email address.

MailRefine

MailRefine is a free email checker that provides 1,000 one-time credits. Similar to Truemail, they have single verify, bulk verify, API and integrations. Their API is also a verify and get result action. However, their pricing is a lot more affordable than Truemail.

Mailifier

Mailifier is an easy-to-use software that helps you in verifying emails to ensure that you can get the high deliverability rate possible. They pride themselves on having high accuracy, fast validation, catch-all validation, and high-end modular API verification service.

Watch my video review and tutorial. 

KleanMail

KleanMail is a much well-backed company with offices in Singapore, India and Rwanda. You can verify mailing list through bulk upload to separate verified emails from invalid emails. It also provides single verification as well as API. However, their integration list is very weak, and they do not have direct integrations with important automation platforms like Pabbly Connect. They do however, provide free email checker of up to 500 email addresses.

Tomba.io 

Tomba.io collects and crafts public data using automation to provide prospecting tools for businesses. It allows you to find email addresses with sources, business information, check business social profiles, and email patterns. Email list verification is possible with bulk upload. Tomba is an odd one from this list because Tomba only verifies business emails and will not be able to verify free emails such as Gmail, Yahoo etc.

Final Thought

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to market your business. It can be used to build a strong customer base, improve brand awareness, and increase sales. It can help you build up a strong database of potential customers, and increase the quality of leads that you receive. However, it requires constant effort and monitoring to ensure that your contact lists are as accurate as possible. By using the email verification tools mentioned above, you don’t need to spend more hours doing the tedious task of verifying email addresses including grammatical errors and typos.