Melissa AU Team | Email Verification | email list cleaning, email validation tools, email verification use cases, verify user identity

Though there are many ways for companies to communicate with customers, email still remains the most popular choice. By 2025, the number of email users around the globe is expected to reach 4.6 billion.

Emails can be used to announce new ranges and seasonal discounts, confirm orders, send bills and more.  Companies can use emails to reach out to people across the world and streamline business processes. It’s efficient and cost-effective but only when you have the right email addresses.

 If you send out an email to john@gail.com, there is a 99% chance your email will bounce back. So, you need to weed out the incorrect email addresses in your database. This is where email verification comes in.

What Is Email Verification?

Email verification refers to checking email addresses as they are typed in a form as to whether they are correct and valid. In addition, emails existing in the database are also checked from time to time to see that they are still valid.

This helps weed out emails that are incorrectly formatted, emails with typographic errors in the domain names, emails that aren’t linked to the relevant person on third-party databases and those that have expired.

Verifying emails to ensure that they are correct and valid ensures that your email can be delivered to the right person. It reduces the bounce rate and thus also protects your sender’s reputation.

6 use cases of email verification services

Let’s take a look at 6 cases in which email verification tools would categorize an email as bad and trigger an alert.

1. Incorrect Email Syntaxes             

The basic syntax for an email is the recipient’s name followed by a single @ symbol, the domain name and the domain extension. In most cases, this is “.com”. The first step in email verification is ensuring that the email entered follows this syntax.

The recipient’s name can have up to 64 upper case or lower-case characters, digits and only certain special characters as long as they are not used at the beginning or end of the section. Some examples of emails with incorrect syntax are johngmail.com, john@com or john@gmail. Such email addresses are weeded out through an email verification API.

• Non-Existent Domain Names

Sometimes the syntax may be right but the domain name entered may be non-existent. This usually results from typographic errors. For example, gmail is a valid domain but gmial or gamil is not. Thus, any emails sent to an address with such domain names will bounce back. Email verification tools will highlight such non-existent domain names and trigger alerts if they are used.

• Mail Serves Follow SMTP Rules

Once the syntax and domain names have been verified, next comes checking the communication between the mail servers. The mail servers associated with an email address are pinged to see whether they follow Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) rules. At the most basic level, the response to these pings should confirm that the inbox exists and can receive incoming mails. Email verification helps identify instances such as when a mail server says the inbox exists but it isn’t set up to receive emails.

• Catch-All Emails

Email verification tools can also help check more details to ensure that your emails are received by the right person. For example, some mail servers may be set up to receive all mail that is sent to it regardless of whether the inbox exists or not. These are known as catch-all emails.

For example, company email addresses may receive email even if the people associated with the email address no longer work at the company. Thus, your email won’t bounce back but it won’t be read either. Email verification can help remove such catch-all emails from your database.

• Disposable Emails

Disposable emails refer to temporary email addresses that can receive emails but self-destruct after a certain length of time. These throwaway email addresses are often used by people who are wary about sharing their personal details. They are advantageous to individuals but can affect email campaign analysis for businesses. Thus, you need to keep them out of your database.

• Role-Based Accounts

If you send an email to role-based accounts such as sales@company.com or info@company.com you cannot guarantee who will be reading your emails. Hence, these email addresses should not be allowed into your database. Email verification APIs can check emails against common roles and titles in multiple languages to identify such email addresses and keep them from entering your database.

In Conclusion

Email verification is easy to integrate into your website and is critical to customer communication. Ideally, look for an email verification API that allows you to check email addresses individually as well as in batches. This helps check new and old mailing lists so that you maintain a consistently high-quality database.