Email Verification: A Complete Overview 2023

What Is Email Verification?

Email verification is the process of determining the authenticity of an email before you reach out to it. Most companies perform verification through a third-party service or software because manually verifying emails is a time-consuming process. However, email verification is essential for maintaining a high sender and deliverability reputation. This is because attempts to engage with nonexistent or inactive emails can impact your deliverability rate.

ISPs and spam filters are constantly hunting for illegitimate emails and malicious content, and a high bounce rate can lead to your messages being sorted as spam or your domain being placed on a blocklist. Verifying emails before sending them can increase your deliverability rate by preventing any unnecessary bounces.

Why Is Email Verification Necessary?

First and foremost, email verification helps improve email deliverability. If you send emails to addresses that aren’t in use, it can damage your reputation or get your domain placed on a blocklist.

Email verification is essential to the health of both your inbox and domain and is a simple but necessary practice to lower your email bounce rate. Just like you wouldn’t randomly send out holiday cards to addresses that may or may not be correct, using a verification service allows you to check the validity of email addresses before you hit send. A verification service can also determine whether the recipient’s inbox is full, so you can prevent a bounce because of that.

Email verification also factors into maintaining good data hygiene. Part of keeping a positive sender reputation is ensuring that your mailing list stays clean, and email verification allows you to simplify the process. People change, deactivate, and abandon emails all the time, so running a verification test on your subscription list will enable you to keep your list clean.

At the same time, you can verify email addresses before you add them to your mailing list to check if a customer accidentally typed their address in wrong or the email was entered incorrectly. Email verification can also keep you from falling into spam traps.

On top of that, verifying emails increases audience reach and the success of email campaigns. It decreases the number of hard bounces, spam reports, and blocks you receive. While checking each new email as you add it to your list can seem tedious, it can significantly boost your sender reputation.

How Does Email Verification Work?

Verifying an email is conducted in three easy steps:

Syntax and Formatting Check

The verification service will start by checking an email’s syntax, also known as the basic construction of the email address. Multiple email providers have specifications regarding the email addresses people can register. For instance, Yahoo doesn’t allow addresses to begin with a number. Verification services will check addresses against the server’s protocol for email syntax.

After checking the address’ syntax, the service will move on to the email formatting. The formatting consists of regulations that indicate what can be used for an email address. Because thousands of variations have to be analyzed, checking the format manually wastes a lot of time. There are tools for rapidly checking all of these variations, from ensuring the “@” sign has been used to identifying any special characters that aren’t allowed in an email address.

Server Confirmation

Once the syntax and format have been analyzed, the verification service moves on to server confirmation. The service checks the DNS records for the domain name of the email address. The domain name is what comes after the “@” symbol. The service tests the mail exchanger to make sure that the address is able to accept emails.

Additionally, the domain or server confirmation will identify addresses that are authentic but unable to accept new mail, saving your incoming message from being bounced. Your team is unable to figure out whether a recipient’s inbox is full before sending an email to them without the assistance of technology, and any kind of email bounce can damage your reputation. Using a service to check this can help maintain a positive sender reputation and deliverability rate.

Mailbox Validation

The final step requires the service to validate the mailbox. The service attempts to contact the SMTP server to see whether the address exists, and if the server responds, the address is ready to accept emails.

The verification service pings the email address with an EHLP message and then waits for the email server to respond. When the server responds, it confirms that the email exists on the server and is active.

Who Uses Email Verification?

Anyone who uses a mailing list or wants to start an email subscriber base should take advantage of an email verification system. As stated in a previous section, you can verify emails on your own, but it takes a fair amount of time. Or you can skip the verification process and start sending emails, but that isn’t recommended because it can lead to a high bounce rate and damage your sender’s reputation.

So just about anyone running an email campaign can use email verification, whether it’s an eCommerce site, blogger, digital marketer, or social influencer. No matter who’s behind the campaign, email verification provides a way to get maximum return for the messages sent. Additionally, the process bolsters the reputation of the sender by increasing their deliverability rate and hopefully the open rate as well.

The Benefits of Email Verification

We’ve all mistyped our email addresses in the past, no matter how good our intentions are. (If we had a penny for every time we accidentally typed “warnupinbox.”) But email verification allows you to weed out any emails that were incorrectly entered into a submission form.

You probably already know why killer email campaigns are essential to business, so you’re looking to improve or maintain your sender reputation. Email verification is a simple way to help lift some of the pressure off yourself to keep your bounce rates low.

You could send out a thousand emails, but if only half of them are accurately entered, your delivery rate will be around 50%. But if you send five hundred emails to verified addresses, your delivery rate will likely be 100%.

The more emails that reach an inbox, the more customers you’ll be able to engage with, and the more sales you’ll make. Ensuring that you’re only sending messages to legitimate emails allows you to focus on creating incredible, engaging email campaigns that make your customers want to learn more and make a purchase.

And the best part is that you don’t have to assign an intern the task of manually inputting or checking all of these emails. There are multiple services you can use to check emails automatically. The free services only allow you to check one address at a time and are ideal for small business owners. Services that charge a minimal fee enable you to run multiple emails at once and are perfect for large companies, cold emailers, or marketing teams doing an email collection campaign.