Email List Checker is a tool or technique used by businesses, advertising companies, and email marketers to make sure their lists are clean, i.e. don't include any inactive, spam or undeliverable email addresses.

These days, cleaning email lists is a mandatory action taken by marketers and businesses after the spread of spam email senders worldwide. This is also a result of the restrictions imposed by ESPs like Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, by creating many filters to analyze and determine if messages are spam or legitimate.

So, how do businesses actually use email list checkers to clean their lists?

You might be surprised to hear, but most businesses don’t really do this themselves! This is because there is no point in them gaining the knowledge and technique to do so, as they would only check their email lists once every three months or so. Even if businesses were to use this service daily, they wouldn’t have much to clean per day.

Email list checker services are provided by specific companies which have the knowledge and expertise to build this technology so that they can give accurate results for each email address inside a list. Email Verifier is offered as an online or cloud-based service hosted by these companies on their servers, working at all times without hassle. Simply, these companies verify email addresses in the list by passing them through the main 7 stages of checking and filtrations as follow:

1. Email Duplication Check: the email list checker or email verifier system as many businesses called it will go through your list and check if there are any duplicated emails inside to remove then leave your list clean free of duplication so it can be moved for the next step of verification.

2. Email Syntax Formatting Check: the system checks the email format of the list one by one to make sure they are properly formatted and don’t have syntax errors. They do so by following the international standards of email format as they cited in RFC 5322 and RFC 6530 standards. For more info about the correct and proper email format please check the full guide on Wikipedia. Look at these example emails to understand what I mean (test..@gmail.com) or (example email@yahoo.co.m) etc.

3. Domain Name Check: After passing through the previous two verification checks the email comes to the step of verifying each domain by looking at the DNS and MX records to check if they are configured correctly and able to receive email or not.

4. Disposable Email Addresses (DEA) Check: Before we go through this process of verification. You may need to know brief info about the disposable email address and why it’s used. Well, Disposable Email Address or as they called it on the internet DEA is a temporary email addresses generated by some companies on the internet for users who want use it to sign up on some websites or services online and they expire after few hours or one-day maximum. The Email List Checker System checks this kind of emails by parsing the list you submit against a well maintained and updated DEA domain database to detect and remove them permanently from the list.

5. Spam Traps Emails Check: what is a spam trap email and where they come from? Spam trap as you can see from its name it’s a trap that had access to your email list by any means to just inform the Major ESPs like Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc that you are sending illegal emails or sending spam which will significantly affect your deliverability and sending reputation. Lifting these kinds of emails into your list will push you down and may lead to putting your IPs and domain name in the blacklist databases. The Email List checker removes these traps by processing the list against a big updated spam traps database leave it clean and ready for the next step.

6. SMTP User Email Check: After the email verifier getting your list successfully passing all the previous verification steps it comes to the most important deep level of verification which is checking for the existence of user mail-box on all servers. It does that by simulating sending email message for each user mail-box then after getting a response from the server it cancel message and closes the connection.

7. Catch-All Email Check: Catch-All Emails are the ones that are not confirmed by their servers if they do exist or not. They just give a standard response to the email verifier system tell they are ready to receive a message for this user mail-box. Sending a message for these kinds of non-confirmed email addresses will result in a hard and soft bounce you don’t need it. The email list checker system normally detects all these kinds of emails and mark them as low-quality ones giving them a name as catch-all emails, so the users have the option to keep or remove them from their lists.

8. Role-Based Email Addresses Check: Usually this kind of check is optional to let people whether they want to keep or remove these emails from their lists as many users prefer not to sending messages to these groups of emails. Role-Based Emails stands for a professional position role inside the company like sales department, marketing department, IT department etc. and the example format of these emails are; sales@companydomain.com, marketing@exampledomain.com, admin@domain.com, contact@domain.com etc. Any professional email list checker system can detect these groups of emails inside the list and remove them easy upon the user request.

After performing all email checks above on the list the system will generate verification reports which are different from one company to another, some will only give you access to only download the valid list report, some will give you two verification reports and some will give you access for more verification reports as you want like; valid list report, invalid list report, unknown list report and full list report which will include all email addresses and the verification result of each email address inside if it’s valid, invalid or unknown. In addition, they will give you a reason for each email address if it’s valid, unknown or invalid so you have a full vision on your list.

What do you expect after cleaning your list using an email list checker?

Well, after going through the full email verification service you can expect many useful advantages:

• - Low bounce rate on your email marketing campaigns.
• - Higher deliverability rate compared to the past.
• - Increase in CTR or click-through rate and open rate as well.
• - Reach more customers than before as your message will mostly hit the inbox of every user.
• - Saving money by only sending a message for the real customers who pay back to your business.
• - Saving time and effort spent on handling bounce back manually each time you send an email campaign.
• - Get a good sending reputation by not sending emails for spam traps or disposable email addresses.

How often do businesses and advertising companies do need to clean email lists?

Email lists can actually go bad quicker than you’d think! A recent study conducted by professionals in this industry found that any email list older than one year has 20-25% bad or undeliverable email addresses included. That’s why you need to verify your list at least twice per year using a professional email verifier service, to get a clear insight into your list.

You may now ask yourself, how much money will I have to pay to get my list cleaned and verified? Don’t worry, whatever the amount of money you pay to get your list verified, it will not equal to the damage you can get if you lift your list unverified. As for the real cost, it depends on the volume of emails you have inside your list.

We do recommend for every business owner, advertising agency, big company, solo ads provider and email marketer everywhere to immediately look for a reliable email list checker or email verifier service provider and get their lists checked and cleaned. Don’t waste your time and money sending emails to fake email addresses that will only get you damage and loss. If you are ready to get your list analyzed, cleaned and verified, we’re happy to assist and take care of your lists. Upload Your List Now.