What is an Email Verification and Checking Tool?

What is an Email Verification and Checking Tool?

An email verification tool checks an email to ensure it’s live, valid and can receive mail. It also identifies old or incorrect email addresses and removes them before they are used in campaigns and other business activities.

This service, in essence, plays a vital role in maintaining good contact data quality for businesses. It’s available as a web-based API that integrates into existing systems and processes that will check and verify emails in real time as they are entered. This service is also available as a data cleansing option, where batch lists can be sent or uploaded to a chosen email verification service provider which will return the list with clean, appended and verified email data.

Learn more: What is Data Cleansing?

Why Use an Email Verification and Checking Tool?

There are many reasons why an email verification and checking service is essential in today’s age. Since email is a primary source of communication, and emails degrade at a rate of 22.5% each year, it is important to keep your email records up to date.

Here are 4 main reasons why:

• Eliminate Hard Bounces: this usually occurs when an email address no longer exists, which automatically causes a hard bounce.
• Sender Reputation: This is a score that an internet service provider (ISP) assigns an organisation or sender. The higher the score, the higher more likely the ISP will deliver emails to the recipient.
• Blacklists: If your organisation gets backlisted due to bad emails, this stops your emails from getting accepted by a receiver’s server.
• Results: Making sure an email marketing list is verified, up to date and doesn’t contain any bad emails will greatly improve results.

What Does an Email Verification Tool Check for?

You can use a global email verification and checking tool to:

• Verify and correct syntax errors in an address, and check for illegal characters and extra “@” characters.
• Verify and correct top-level domain names.
• Check for and correct misspelt domain names.
• Check for and correct domains that have changed.
• Standardise casing in email addresses.
• Perform real-time mailbox validation.
• Check sender blacklist cautions.
• Pace email delivery based on confidence scores.
• Verify the email account (the inbox) does not exist in the given domain.

How an Email Verification Tool Protects Your Sender’s Reputation

Your sender’s reputation is vital to ensure your emails safely get through to your recipients and don’t get filtered to their SPAM folders.

Here are several factors that organisations should consider when sending out emails to ensure safe ISP filtering:

• The number of emails sent by the organisation.
• How many emails are being successfully delivered if sending in batch (i.e., email campaigns)?
• How many emails bounce due to being incorrect, unknown, or for other reasons?
• Level of engagement from recipients; this could mean replying, forwarding, clicking links, or deleting emails from an organisation.
• How many recipients unsubscribe from the organisation’s email list?
• How often an organisation may hit a recipient’s spam trap
• An organisation’s inclusion on other blacklists.