The email marketing world is like playing the floor is lava.

There are bounces to dodge, toxic email addresses to battle, your sender’s reputation to protect, and fight for your life to not be blackmailed.

Not fun at all.

Yet, email verification service is your white knight.

Email verification is the process of verifying if the email address exists, is invalid or is undeliverable. It’s a must if you want to protect your sender’s reputation and keep a high inbox placement score.

Here is everything you need to know about email verification.

What is email validation and how does it work?

Email validation is the process of verifying if an email address is deliverable and valid.

It’s a process that catches typos, email addresses, and domain provider validity.

Email validation helps in organizing and cleaning your email addresses list. It also protects your email sender score and maximizes the efficiency of your email program.

After you upload your bulk email list, email validation services run quick checks to determine which email addresses are either valid, risky, or invalid.

Valid: email address exists, and it is error-free. This verification will be complete till the mailbox level.

Risky: the recipient exists but there are other factors that indicate that this address could still result in a bounce.

Invalid: If an email address is marked as invalid that means it contains syntax errors, DNS errors and/or mailbox errors.

Why do you need to verify your email list?

Sending emails to addresses that don’t exist causes these emails to bounce back to your inbox. Cleaning your email list of bad email addresses improves email deliverability and keeps your domain safe.

A high bounce rate will harm your sender reputation, or even worse: get your domain blacklisted. Why is that so? High bounce rates alarm the email service provider, who flags you as a spammer. Your emails will go to the spam folder or won’t be delivered at all.

In the worst-case scenario, if you ignore a bounce rate higher than 2%, your domain will be blacklisted. To resolve your blacklist is like Scarlet’s letter, very difficult and practically impossible.

Your only solution is to set up a new domain than remove the old one from a blacklist.

Email validation tools save you the trouble of manually removing invalid email addresses. Email verification tools will identify which email addresses on your list are undeliverable and would bounce back and which ones are valid and safe to send.

How can you verify and validate emails?

Email validation is a three-step process, syntax check, server confirmation, and mailbox validation.

1/ Email Syntax & Formatting Check:

Email formatting rules are complex and make it hard to check manually a long list of email addresses. In seconds, email verification services identify issues in both the domain and email addresses’ syntax, like invalid characters, missing @ symbols, and an infinite number of others.

2/ Domain Confirmation:

Checks the DNS records if the domain name is valid and active and tests the mail exchanger (MX) if ready to receive mail.  Once the syntax, formatting, domain, and server are valid, on tp the last step, mailbox validation.

3/ Mailbox Validation:

The email validation service utilizes SMTP protocol to contact the mail server and verify that the mailbox is ready to receive messages. This process doesn’t need to send a single email message.

On average, the entire email verification process takes less than 1 second. But the email verification process can take longer, due to the response time of the mail server under test. Older mail servers, busy servers, and sophisticated anti-spam systems can all influence the response time.

Many verification services offer additional tools called risk assessment tools.

Risk assessment tools help to eliminate invalid data or identify potentially problematic emails, like:

• Duplicate email addresses
• Role Accounts
• Catch-All email servers
• Temporary email addresses
• Spam Traps

What is Email Validation?

Email validation is the process of verifying email lists for invalid, incorrect, non-existent, and undeliverable email addresses. Email validation checks for typos and email security issues and domain.

Invalid email addresses in your emailing address list raise your bounce rate and tarnish your sender’s reputation. Email validation removes inactive or unresponsive email addresses.

How does Email Validation work?

Email validation is a process that verifies if the email address is valid and deliverable. It verifies email addresses’ syntax, domain, MX records, and SMTP server and domain.

How Does Email Validation Help?

Email validation is a process of steps for email addresses validation. The email validation has a series of checks:

• Syntax: detects incorrect addresses because of typos. A valid email address should have the ‘@’ symbol in the username, be within 64 characters, and the email domain names must have 255 characters, maximum.
• Domain: detects fake domains from the authentic and operational ones.
• MX Records: detects if the domain has any MX (mail exchange) servers. If the domain has no MX server, it will not accept emails.
• SMTP Server And SMTP Mailbox: detects whether the MX servers and the accounts are operational. This check helps to avoid email bounce backs.

Different ways in which Email Validation can be done:

1. Manual entry is subject to error when a new subscriber is typing in their email address. If you add an auto-complete feature to help select the appropriate email address.

2. Email verification services give you real-time validation of whether an email address is valid or not.

3. Double opt-in is one of the best ways to validate email addresses. When a new subscriber signs up for your email list or newsletter, send an email to validate the email address. This option is a god-sent because it makes sure you only have correct and valid email addresses. Many people don’t like this option, as it may reduce your overall opt-in rates.

How does Email Inspector validate your email addresses?

Emailinspector does a scan test on a portion of your list. On this test batch, Emailinspector checks email syntax, verifies its email domain (MX record), and validates the email addresses from the email service providers.

If the percentage of risky emails in the sample list surpasses the tolerable, Emailinspector will ban users.

Next thing, you can scan your complete email addresses lists. This way, you will verify your entire email list before importing it into an ESP.