Email Verifier

An email verifier is a SaaS product and a powerful outreach tool that helps marketers verify users’ email addresses to ensure a good delivery rate and reach potential customers.

Say you’ve collected an email list that only consists of opted in subscribers. Ideally, they have already confirmed their email address in the second step of the double opt-in process. Nevertheless, this initial confirmation does not necessarily mean the email address will be active forever. Here are four reasons why email addresses may become invalid and why verifying them is a good idea.

1. People may change their email provider. Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc., differ in functionality, design, and policies. For their comfort, users may switch to another provider, and their email addresses will change. Their initial permission for receiving emails from your brand doesn’t apply to their new address. There’s no way you can know that particular users changed their email provider unless you verify their email addresses.
2. People may create a new account within the same provider. People who originally registered an email address for personal use may decide to use it for business communication instead. An informal email address, like ghostkilla1488@gmail.com, will look inappropriate and make the wrong impression. For this reason, a user may create another account with their real name in the address, for instance, malcolm-smith@gmail.com.
3. People may change their place of work. This is a widespread issue in the B2B segment because many professionals move between companies. When they start a career in the other company, they abandon their past corporate email address and change it to a new one.
4. The domain may have closed. The part of an email address that goes after the “@” symbol is a domain address. For personal communication, people use email providers and their email address ends with a respective domain address, like “gmail.com,” “outlook.com,” “yahoo.com,” etc. Marketers and business people use corporate domain addresses instead. These users won’t be able to receive your emails if their company is out of business and the domain is down.

Now you understand that verifying email addresses is key to keeping your mailing list healthy. A professional email verifier can help you remove any inactive addresses from your email list and save money on email delivery. Let’s learn how this technology works.

There are three ways email verifiers analyze email addresses. Here they are:

1. Syntax check. The simplest way to confirm that an address is active is to check whether it’s written correctly. It should contain no spaces or commas and should have the right structure with the mailbox name at the beginning and domain address after the “@” symbol. If there’s a typo in the address, you won’t be able to deliver your message.
2. Domain existence check. This helps to identify whether a domain address is registered and works appropriately. If it doesn’t work, all email addresses hosted on this domain no longer exist either and won’t receive emails.
3. MX record check. This is the most sophisticated way to verify email addresses. The Mail Exchanger record identifies which server is responsible for receiving emails. Email verifiers check if the server responsible for a particular user’s address is registered and working properly.

All professional email verifiers use the methods above. However, there are more specifics that will help you make the right choice.

Let’s have a look at a few factors that matter the most when choosing an email verifier:

1. Email verifier type. This software can be a computer program or an online service. It is better to stick with the second option since it requires no storage space on your computer and you can access it anywhere, anytime, from any device connected to the internet.
2. Flexibility. An email verifier enables you to check email addresses one-by-one or in bulk. The service should be capable of processing both corporate and personal email addresses.
3. Various validation checks. A good email verifier allows you to run syntax, domain, and MX checks depending on your needs and budget.
4. Integrations with third-party services. You should be able to integrate your email verifier with lead generation and email marketing tools. Such integrations will improve your overall digital marketing strategy.

Let’s review some popular email verifiers.

What is the best free email verifier?

Here’s the comparison of four popular email verifiers. Let’s find out how many emails you can verify with each of these services on a free plan and what functions they offer.

SendPulse Email Verifier

Functionality. SendPulse provides the in-built Email Verifier that you can use before sending your email campaign. It removes spam-traps, addresses with typos, and non-existing addresses from your list. You can verify an existing mailing list, upload a new one in TXT, CSV, XLS, XLSX formats, or verify a single email address.

After verification, you'll receive a report with "valid" and "invalid" email addresses and the separate mailing list with valid addresses. You can add segments and custom variables to it.

Here's the verification process in SendPulse.

Free plan. You can verify 100 email addresses every month.

Paid plan. The price for verifying 10,000 email addresses is $48.

Snov.io

Functionality. Snov.io allows you to run syntax, domain, and MX record checks. The service detects disposable and temporarily unavailable domains, identifies catch-all-emails, and removes duplicate email addresses. You can verify emails in bulk, one-by-one, or by using email verification API.

Snov.io provides three convenient Chrome extensions to find, verify, and track emails. The flexible platform allows you to use CSV, XLS, TXT, and Google Sheets to export data. Aside from that, you can send email campaigns, drip campaigns, and use helpful email list management tools.

Here’s the verification process of 100 emails in Snov.io.

Free plan. It allows you to verify up to 100 email addresses and detect catch-all emails.

Paid plan. The price for verifying 10,000 emails is $69.

Hunter

Functionality. Hunter provides syntax, domain existence, and MX record checks that you can run en masse, one-by-one, and via API. This service can detect temporarily unavailable and disposable domains, identify catch-all emails, and remove duplicates.

Hunter provides email address search, verification, and tracking tools with their Chrome extensions. Besides, you can export your list of email addresses using CSV, XLS, TXT, and Google Sheets. With Hunter, you can manage your email lists and send email campaigns.

Here’s the verification process in Hunter.

Free plan. You can verify 50 email addresses at no cost.

Paid plan. The price for verifying 10,000 emails is $199.

ZeroBounce

Functionality. This service allows you to run syntax and MX record checks as well as verify emails in bulk, one-by-one, or via API. It detects temporary unavailable or disposable domains and identifies catch-all email addresses. Using ZeroBounce, you can export your verified mailing lists with CSV or TXT files. Unlike Snov.io and Hunter, this service is only focused on email verification features.

Here’s the verification process in ZeroBounce.

Free plan. You can verify five email addresses anonymously or up to 100 email addresses if you create an account.

Paid plan. The price for verifying 10,000 is $65.

To use an email verifier, you need to take three simple steps, and the service will do all the technical operations on its own:

1. Upload the list of email addresses;
2. Run the verification;
3. Export the list of active addresses.

Having a list of verified emails at hand, you can send an email campaign with better email deliverability and better engagement rate.

Last Updated: 22.03.2023