Discovering how to check for a valid email address is essential in today's digital communication, especially for those frequently managing email lists or individual correspondences. This guide navigates you through efficient methods to validate email addresses, enhancing your email marketing and lead generation campaigns by ensuring your messages reach active, engaged recipients.
This is where we come in! In this article, we’ll be going over how to check for a valid email address by including:
1. Essentials of Email Address Validation
- Understanding what constitutes a valid email address and why it's important to verify them.
2. Manual and Automated Verification Techniques
- Different methods for checking email validity, both manually and using automated tools.
3. Strategies to Prevent Invalid Email Addresses
- Tips and techniques to avoid having invalid emails in your lists.
4. Improving Email Campaign Effectiveness
- How valid email addresses improve email deliverability, sender reputation, and overall campaign success.
5. Practical Tools and Resources
- Overview of various email checkers and verification tools available for ensuring email list accuracy.
Through this guide, readers will explore the best email validation methods, including email checkers and verification tools, gaining comprehensive knowledge about ensuring email address validity to enhance the effectiveness and reliability of their email communications and marketing strategies.
Quick Links:
- What an email address is
- What a valid email address is
- Why checking email addresses is important
- Types of email addresses
- How to validate an email address manually
- Automated methods to verify an entire list of emails
- How to avoid invalid email addresses appearing on your list
Let’s go ahead and jump right into it.
What Is an Email Address?
An email address is a private and direct point of contact to other users through the internet. An email address acts as a virtual postal address where messages and attachments can be sent from one person to another.
Emailing is generally the preferred method of contact in professional settings as it is private and direct and can deliver large messages, images, and files to anywhere in the world.
What Is a Valid Email Address?
A valid email address is an email address that is active and functional. One of the easiest ways to check that an email address is valid at a glance is by ensuring that the email prefix and domain name fit standard syntax requirements.
Email addresses with many special characters or that begin or end with punctuation are likely not valid.
Why Is Checking Email Addresses Important?
So, why should you check? There are a variety of reasons why you will want to make sure that the email addresses that you are reaching out to are valid. This is particularly true if you use email communication and email lists to grow your company or brand.
Increase Email Deliverability Rate
Your email deliverability rate refers to the number of emails that reach your intended recipients’ inboxes successfully.
A high email deliverability rate that avoids common spam triggers is essential to achieving your goal, whether that be building businesses or companies, promoting a product or service, or making professional connections.
Sending off emails to clients, customers, or partners that only reach them is a good use of time and money.
You’re going to want to make sure that all email addresses either on your email list or that you are reaching out to manually are valid to maintain a good email delivery rate.
Protect Your Sender Reputation
Protecting your reputation as a sender is essential to ensure that your emails are reaching your intended recipients or target audience and not going straight to spam. One of the top ways to protect your sender's reputation is by keeping low bounce rates and high response rates.
Ensuring that the emails you send are reaching valid and active email addresses will increase your response rates and decrease the chance that your emails will bounce or be sent to spam.
This will contribute to keeping your sender reputation clean, which will do wonders for your branding and future email campaigns.
Achieve Better Return on Investment (ROI)
A great return on investment is critical to achieving a successful email marketing campaign. This return on investment is calculated by measuring the total gain made through the campaign against the investments made in the campaign itself.
For the best chance of having a good return on investment, ensuring your email list is not full of invalid email addresses is essential. This will lower the bounce rate and likely produce a better return on investment.
Increased Conversions
By double-checking that the emails on your mailing list are valid, you will subsequently see an increased rate of conversions. Sending your emails to valid addresses will significantly increase the likelihood that they will be opened and read. This, in turn, is more likely to result in the outreach email converting to customers, clients, or partnerships.
Elevation of the Brand Profile
Many benefits come with ensuring you reach out to only valid email addresses manually or through mailing lists during email marketing campaigns. Decreased bounce rates, better ROI, and an improved sender reputation are all factors that will contribute to the elevation of your brand profile.
Types of Email Addresses
There are a few distinct types of email addresses out there that you want to become familiar with to ensure you are contacting valid email addresses. Let’s go ahead and take a look at the most common types of email addresses and how to identify them at a glance.
Regular Expression (RegEx)
The regular expression, or RegEx, is a term often used in coding to refer to specific patterns and strings of text. In terms of email addresses, an email with a regular expression would be an address that follows a specific pattern of text that aligns with valid email addresses.
For example, an email that follows the pattern of ‘[email protected]’ would fit a regular expression pattern. An email address that breaks this pattern is likely to be some form of the invalid email address.
Disposable Email Addresses
Disposable email addresses, as the name suggests, are email addresses that are created quickly to be used once or twice and then disposed of. Contacting these emails will likely not result in a response from the owner, as they have already disposed of the account.
There are a few ways to avoid disposable email addresses, such as disallowing signups from disposable addresses on certain domains or utilizing an email address validation application programming interface (API).
Checklist for a Valid Email Address
The four main components of a valid email address are the recipient name, @ symbol, domain name, and the top-level domain. In the example ‘[email protected]’, the recipient name is ‘username’, the @ symbol is (of course) ‘@’, the domain name is ‘email’, and the top-level domain is ‘.com’.
Acceptable Email Prefix Formats
On either side of the @ symbol, there should be an acceptable email prefix for an email address to be valid. Let’s go ahead and take a look at what acceptable and unacceptable email prefix formats look like.
Acceptable email prefix formats:
Unacceptable email prefix formats:
Notice that punctuation at the beginning, end, or clustered in the email prefix results in an invalid email address. Briefly checking the prefix format of an email address will indicate to you right away whether it is valid or invalid.
Acceptable Email Domain Formats
The email domain is the other aspect of an email address you want to check. It’s a must that your email list complies with standard email format rules. Let’s look at a few email domain formats that indicate a valid address.
Acceptable email domain formats:
Unacceptable email domain formats:
- [email protected]
- username@email#archive.com
- username@email…com
Email domain formats must be at least two characters long and cannot include any special characters or excessive punctuation.
How to Validate an Email Address Manually
So, you’ve received an email from an individual or are checking over your mailing list and want to validate an email address. How do you go about it? There is a solution — let’s review the steps to validate an email address manually.
Step 1: Check the Formatting and Syntax of the Email Address
The first step when manually validating an email address is to take a look at the formatting and the syntax of the email address. Ensuring that it passes the format validation should give you some indication regarding the validity of the email address.
Step 2: Use a RegEx Tool to Check an Individual Email Address
A reliable way to check the validity of an individual email address is to use some form of RegEx tool to confirm that the email pattern matches an approved pattern of a valid email address. A quick Google search will pull up several RegEx services online that can check an individual email address for validity by scanning the regular expression of the address.
Step 3: Use a DNS or Domain Name Checker for Each Domain in an Email Address
If you’re unsure about the domain name in a particular email address, you can always use a domain name system (DNS) or a domain name checker to confirm that the domain name in the email is valid. As with RexEg tools, many checkers online can scan and check if the address matches a known domain.
Step 4: Check If the Mailbox Exists with a Single Email Validation Tool
The final way to check the validity of a particular email address is to use some form of email validation tool. These can check the email address and determine whether an address is valid and has an associated active mail server.
Countless email validation tools out there can scan the syntax, RegEx, domain name, and several other factors to determine the validity of the address.
Automated Methods to Verify an Entire List of Emails
What happens if it is not just one singular email address you want to check for validity but an entire list of emails? Don’t worry — in cases such as this, there are many quick and accessible resources to check the validity of emails simultaneously.
Email Checkers
Many email checkers will allow you to paste an entire list of emails into them, which they will then scan and check for validity. For businesses looking to acquire a comprehensive email list quickly, explore BookYourData's options to buy an email list. This is a great tool to utilize when it comes to email marketing campaigns that use extensive mailing lists.
Email Verification Tools
Like email checkers, online email verification tools can verify large quantities of email addresses at a time. These tools consider information surrounding the email, such as the syntax of the address and the data and records of any domains attached to it.
Pro tip: When using Bookyourdata, you don’t need to use another 3rd party email verification tool because real-time email verification is a built-in function at Bookyourdata and is available upon each export.
[CTA1]
Email Address Validator
A simple email address validator is a quick and convenient way to confirm the validity of several emails at a time. Getting email address validations before starting your email marketing campaign will significantly decrease your bounce rate and improve your sender reputation.
Domain Name System (DNS) Checker
If you have noticed many invalid domain names attached to your mailing list or inbox emails, it is worth putting them through a domain name system checker.
This will be able to scan an address, see if it is listed in the domain’s directory, and highlight any addresses that include an invalid domain name.
Single Email Checker
For individual email addresses that appear slightly suspicious, a single email address checker will do the trick to confirm their validity.
This is also useful after using a bulk verifier tool on a long list of emails to double-check any email addresses flagged as invalid to verify the accuracy of the initial email check.
Bulk Verifier Tool
A bulk verifier tool will be your best friend when it comes to checking the validity of long lists of email addresses.
Email marketing campaigns are only successful so long as the email addresses in the mailing lists are valid, and bulk verifier tools will ensure this is the case.
How to Avoid Invalid Email Addresses Appearing on Your List
There is still one question to be answered: how do these invalid email addresses appear on your mailing list in the first place? More importantly, is there any way to prevent this from happening?
Short answer: absolutely. Let’s look at ways to avoid invalid email addresses appearing on your list and in your contacts.
Use Double Opt-In
The double opt-in feature is one of the most effective ways of preventing people from signing up for your email subscription with an invalid address. This will require individuals to type in their email address twice before submitting it.
This decreases the likelihood of using disposable emails and prevents mistyped email addresses — something that is far more common than you may think.
Implement Email Validation Tools
Regularly running your list through email validation tools will keep your mailing list clean and free from disposable or invalid email addresses. Keeping on top of this will keep your sender's reputation clean and lower the likelihood that your email bounces.
Regularly Clean Your List
Along with regularly checking your mailing list with email validation tools, you should also be regularly cleaning your list. Remove new invalid or disposable email addresses to keep a clean mailing list.
Monitor Bounce Rates
Keeping an eye on your bounce rates will help you to identify any problem emails that need to be checked with some form of email validity checker.
A good email does not bounce when sent a test email and does not result in delivery errors! Emails repeatedly bouncing from a particular address indicate an invalid or disposable address that should be removed.
Avoid Buying Lists If They Don’t Do Real-time Email Verification
Not only does buying mailing lists mean that the recipients won’t perfectly reflect your target audience, which is generally the case when you put together your list, but it also increases the chance of there being old, dormant, and invalid email addresses when you acquire lists from 3rd parties which do not capability of email verification. It's also essential to understand the legality of such purchases. Learn more about this in our article on the legality of buying email lists.
Use CAPTCHA
Using some form of CAPTCHA in your email subscription signup page will ensure that everybody who submits an email address is human and that an automatic service isn’t doing this. This dramatically decreases the chance of invalid email addresses on your list.
FAQs to Check for Valid Email Address
How Many Emails Can I Verify at Once?
The amount of emails you can verify at once entirely depends on which email verification tool you use. Various email validity checkers have different capacities, from searching emails by name to validating hundreds at a time.
What Happens If My Email Gets Blacklisted?
If your email gets blacklisted, you’ll first want to determine whether it is your IP address or domain that is blacklisted. From there, you’ll want to identify why this has been blacklisted, then file an appeal with the blacklisting site.
Can I Check If an Email Address is Valid Without Actually Sending an Email?
Yes, you can check if an email address is valid without sending an email. This can be done by checking the syntax and domain or through specific email verification tools.
Wrapping Up: Crucial Reminders on How to Check Valid Email Address
The importance of checking the validity of the email addresses you are contacting manually and through mailing lists for email marketing campaigns cannot be overstated. Avoiding contact with invalid or disposable email addresses will improve your sender reputation, lower bounce rates, and increase conversion rates. Here are a few ways to ensure the email addresses you send to are valid:
- Returns a successful delivery report
- Responds to a verification request
- Is recognized by email verification tools
- Is not flagged as a disposable address
- Is not found on blacklists
- Is confirmed by the recipient
[CTA1]
[CTA2]