Email Address Verification Services are a must-have tool that any business owner and email marketer needs nowadays.

For those who don’t know, any email list you have is getting on average 10-20% bad subscribers per year. That means your list includes bad or invalid email addresses and you don’t even know about them!

For those who don’t know, any email list you have is getting on average 10-20% bad subscribers per year. That means your list includes bad or invalid email addresses and you don’t even know about them!

So what is the solution? This is where the Email Address Verification Service comes in! This service determines whether emails in your list are valid before you even think about sending your first email campaign.

The Email Address Verification Service does this by analyzing your email list against different factors they have developed to determine exactly which email addresses are valid or not. Usually, these services are hosted and operated over the cloud so you don’t have to worry about your IPs, domains or personal email address.

How Does Email Address Verification Service Work?

Any Email Address can be validated by passing through six verification stages, starting from checking email syntax for error and ending with checking the user mailbox for existence on the recipient servers.

At the end of the email list verification process, any bad email addresses will be collected and removed from the list, leaving a good, clean and fully deliverable email list. This list is ready for delivering any messages to any servers whether they are free or business email addresses.

Let’s look in more detail into how the email address verification is done:

Step 1: Email Address Verification Syntax Check

In this step, the service will analyze your list and make sure all email addresses are correctly formatted according to IETF standards.

Step 2: Domain MX Check

After passing the first step of validity, if the email is correctly formatted, it will move to the next step that will check the MX and DNS records of the email domain (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo). If there are no MX or DNS records, that email address will be marked as invalid. If there are MX or DNS records on the email domain, the email passes is verified through the following step.

Step 3: Removing role-based email addresses (optional)

This step is optional and customers can choose to keep these types of emails in their lists as they may be valid. However, many customers prefer not to send emails to these addresses as they affect deliverability rate and significantly decrease your sending reputation over many ISPs. Examples of role-based emails include: “info@domain.com”,” admin@domain.net”, “webmaster@domain.org” “sales@domain.com” , “support@domain.com”.

Step 4: Removing temporary or disposable email addresses

The Email Address Verification Service will now go through the list and check if there are any temporary or disposable email addresses. These kinds of emails are usually called Disposable Email Addresses or DEA and they expire after a few hours or days. If any such email addresses are part of the list, they will be marked as invalid and removed from the verified list.

Step 5: Honeypot and spam traps

Honeypots and Spam trap Emails are usually used by ESPs and ISPs to differentiate the spammers and eliminate them from sending more spamming emails. They do so by checking emails and domains against known databases they maintain and update frequently. The Email Address Verification Service also checks for Honeypot and Spam Traps in order to remove them permanently and keep the list clean and safe to send messages to.

Step 6: User mailbox check

Finally, the last step of the Email Address Verification process involves a deep checking of the user mailbox for existence on the recipient server. It checks every email address in the list that has passed the previous five steps and marks it as valid if it has an existing mailbox.

This quick tour of how the Email Address Verification process works has probably shown you how important it is to verify any email list you intend to use for email campaigns. It will save you time - by not having to handle hard or soft bounces - and money - by not sending any emails to invalid addresses in the first place!