Email (or e-mail) is an electronic means of exchanging messages, most commonly used in business, education and technical communication. It is the dominant form of communication across most spheres of society and allows people to communicate with others without having to rely on conventional forms of mail.

How to check if an email is valid come from a wide range of sources: emails that are accidentally sent to the wrong recipients, hacked addresses, purchased lists, spam traps and inactive mailboxes. Some of these are completely avoidable while others are out of your control – but there are steps you can take to keep your email list clean.

The Ultimate Guide to Checking the Validity of an Email Address

First, you can check the syntax of an email address by pinging the sender server. This is a slow and potentially risky process, but it can get you the basic verification results that you need.

There are also standalone email verifiers that don’t require any installation and will tell you whether an address is valid or not. But these aren’t suitable for email marketers with extensive lists that need to be verified before launching campaigns.

Rather than wasting time and resources sending to bad email addresses, it is better to focus on sending out your emails to validated subscribers, thereby boosting your ROI and improving your sender reputation. By identifying and eliminating invalid emails from your list, you can be assured that you are sending only to active subscribers who are likely to respond to your email campaign. This will prevent your marketing campaigns from suffering the negative effects of a hard bounce rate, poor ISP rating or being blocked.