Clean email lists, high delivery rates, and a good sender reputation are benefits that every mail sender can get from email verification lists.
In this article, we will walk you through the step-by-step guide on how Email verification work, propose optimal tools for verification, and describe how to prevent problematic emails from getting into your lists.
Email Verification
Validating email addresses means verifying the existence of addresses and the ability to send them out without sending test emails to them.
Email Verification helps reduce the performance of hard and soft bounces, avoid spam traps, and leads to an increase in the effectiveness of your email campaign as a whole.
With email verification, you can check the following:
- Syntax – incorrectly written emails;
- Duplicate emails;
- Spam traps;
- Contacts with many complaints about spam.
- Disposable mailboxes – nobody will ever read the mail arriving at them.
- “Service” addresses (Role-based Addresses) that are determined by position, not by the person;
- A mail exchanger (MX) – a master record for the mail domain;
- SMTP connection with the recipient’s server that indicates whether his email account actually exists;
- Contact activity/inactivity – whether the user currently uses the specified mailbox.
The username may contain:
- Latin alphabet
- Figures
- Signs! # $% & ‘* + – / =? ^ _ `{| } ~
- A point, except for the first and last character, which you can’t repeat
The hostname consists of several components separated by a period and not exceeding 63 characters, and suffixes (first-level domains).
Components, in turn, consist of Latin letters, numbers and hyphens, and hyphens cannot be at the beginning or at the end of a component. Suffixes are a limited list of first-level domains.
Spam traps
A spam trap is an email address or an entire server specially designed to track unwanted traffic and determine its source. Mail service providers and anti-spam services use spam traps to monitor senders and determine their reputation.
Therefore, it is very important to minimize the number of spam traps in your address list. A large number of spam traps in the list indicate that something is wrong with the list.
The spam traps can be dangerous because of:
- Putting the senders in blacklists.
- Reducing sender reputation.
- Sending messages into the Spam folder.
- Blocking mailing.
- Low mailing results.
Reasons to Verify Emails
Email verification is important to deliverability and overall performance. The most common reasons for verifying emails are:
- Improving inbox deliverability
- Reducing hard bounces.
- Engagement Rates Boost
- Eliminating Spam
- Reducing the number of high-risk email accounts
- Determining the catch-all email accounts
- Avoid temporary accounts
- Escaping spambots
- Detecting typos
Ways to Verify Emails
There are three trusted steps to verify emails:
1) Checking the format and syntax of the address
At the first stage, it’s essential to check the correspondence of email addresses to generally accepted standards.
Mistakes are also detected in both parts of the address – the local part (before the @ symbol) and the domain part (after the @ symbol). These can be spaces, extra and non-typical characters, the absence of the @ character, and so on.
2) Verification of the domain and server
After confirming the syntax and format, the authentication and activity of the DNS records need to be checked. At the same stage, the authenticity of the MX record is verified, as well as its ability to receive letters.
3) Mailbox confirmation
At the last stage, the existence of the mailbox needs confirmation, and it how full is it. Such verification takes place with the help of the SMTP protocol.
The used verification tool pings a specific email address with EHLO or HELO messages and captures the server response. If it responds, then the box is considered to be valid and active.
How to choose an optimal email verifier
There are two categories of tools for email addresses verifiers: programs and SaaS (software-as-a-service). The application needs to be downloaded and installed on a computer, while SaaS solutions are available online, so you can work with them through web browsers on any device.
Typically, computer programs allow you to verify an unlimited number of email addresses. In the case of online tools, the customer pays for the monthly subscription and the number of verifications available during the month.
If you have an old database, you can bring it back to life in three steps:
- Check the database with a verifier, get rid of invalid addresses.
- Segment by last upload date or by subscription date if this is your first mailing.
- Send resuscitation letters. Return to the database of subscribers who have undergone resuscitation.
We recommend to check all the available email verifiers and choose the one that best suits your purposes. The best way to test how the email checkers work is by using them at the subscription stage and to double opt-in.
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