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Email Verification
Email verification is the process in which you determine the authenticity of an email before you attempt to reach out to it. This is typically done through a 3rd party service or software, as email verification is a labor intensive process to do manually. Email verification is a critical aspect of maintaining a high sender/deliverability reputation as repeated attempts to contact nonexistent addresses can be taken into consideration when ISPs and Spam filters are attempting to identify the legitimacy of incoming and outgoing mail. Let's look deeper into why email verification is important and how exactly the process works.
Why is Email Verification Important?
Email verification is critical for the health of your inbox and domain because it is one of the more simple ways to avoid having an email bounce. Much in the same way that you wouldn’t want to physically mail a letter to a nonexistent street address, email verification will quickly determine if a mailing address exists and if it can accept external emails.
Email verification is also a critical aspect of practicing good data hygiene, being able to determine the accuracy of emails within any body of data. As time goes on, emails will be changed, deactivated, or abandoned by people for a variety of reasons. Email verification ensures that you can easily determine the health and existence of another inbox before first contact is attempted.
How Do I Verify My Emails?
There are two primary ways in which you can utilize email verification. Since all businesses and individuals operate in different manners, the approach you choose to utilize will primarily be dependent upon what makes the most sense for you and your business/workflow. These two approaches to email verification are as follows
1. Utilizing/Developing an API to validate emails as they are entered into a CRM/submitted via an online form
2. Submitting a spreadsheet file to an email verification service that will process a set amount of emails and downloading the results to reprocess within your workflow.
Nearly every email verification service that exists at this time supports both of these methods of verification.
How Does Email Verification Work?
Email verification is a generally straightforward process that requires a few steps to execute. The logic behind the process is to essentially ping the associated domain of an email address and determine if.
A) If a mail server exists under this domain
B) If this mail server can accept mail
C) If the email address in question exists under this mail server/can accept mail.
By pinging a mail server looking to confirm if all 3 of these criteria are met, you can safely assume that the email address in question is legitimate if it passes this test. There are various other manners in which email verification services determine the validity of an email address such as verifying the syntax of an email address, checking said email address against black lists/spam lists to see if the address in question has been included onto them, as well as determining the configuration of a mail server to see if it will accept all incoming mail even if the address in question is nonexistent.
An important note to make regarding email verification is the existence of mail servers that accept all incoming mail no matter what. These email addresses existing under these types of mail servers are typically referred to as ‘Catch all” emails, as it is difficult to accurately assess if an email address is valid or not. To be safe when attempting to keep your deliverability as high as possible, it is a good idea to avoid outreach to catch all emails as the chances of having your message bounce or not reach its intended recipient is much higher.
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