How to Verify Personal Email Addresses

Whether you’re distributing a newsletter to engaged subscribers or conducting a cold email campaign, your deliverability is only as good as the quality of your contact list. Investing time to verify personal email addresses before you send your next campaign can significantly improve your inbox placement rates, build trust, and boost ROI.

But identifying valid emails can be challenging. People change their email addresses all the time, from switching to a Gmail account post-graduation to opening new business accounts. And when emails go out of service, they become useless to marketers looking to connect with them.

Verify Personal Email Addresses: Tips for Targeting Your Audience

The best way to verify an email address without sending a test message is by performing a DNS lookup to check for active email servers. Typical verification techniques include syntax checks, SMTP tests, and assessment of the domain’s MX records. This method is also able to identify the date of first seen, which can help identify new or risky addresses. This date could indicate the date an address was created or the date of a data breach or other incident.

Alternatively, you can use online tools to perform more extensive validations on the email addresses in your database. These can analyze a person’s behavior to determine if they are a bad actor, as well as link their other personal identifiers to an email address. This allows for a more comprehensive analysis of an email address, which is helpful for detecting bad actors at account opening, prior to confirming a transaction, and other points in the customer lifecycle.