What is an email verifier and why should you use it?

An email verifier is a service designed to check your mailing list for invalid email addresses.

Why use an email verifier?

If soft or hard bounces keep showing up in your deliverability reports, then your database contains invalid email addresses or addresses of recipients whose mailbox is full. If your bounce rate is too high, email services, like Gmail, may block your sender address.

Verifying the email addresses on your mailing list will help you to identify invalid and unavailable email addresses and remove them from your list.

What email addresses are considered invalid, and why are they on your mailing list?

Even if you collect email addresses legitimately and have never bought contact lists, your database may have invalid addresses. Here are several types of invalid addresses:

• Outdated addresses
  Over time, some email addresses in the database may have become inactive. Perhaps, the owners abandoned them because of receiving a lot of spam, they forgot their mailbox password, changed their mail service, or switched to another job, which means they changed their corporate email address.
• Incorrect emails
  When users enter an email address in a subscription form, they may have made a typo. Such addresses are likely to appear in your mailing list, if you do not use double opt-in subscriptions.
• Spam traps
  These email addresses are set up by email providers to expose and blacklist senders with bad reputation. Spam traps can also be email addresses that were once used but have since been abandoned. The presence of such addresses in your mailing list can lead to a decrease in your sender reputation, being added to black lists, and partial or complete blocking of email campaigns from your server.
  Spam traps can get on your list if you use services to find the contact information of potential customers instead of having them subscribe on their own.

To find and remove invalid email addresses from your list, use an email verification service. Check out our article on How to Verify Email Addresses to learn more.

Last Updated: 02.01.2024