What is Email Validation: Everything you need to know

Naval Kishor
6 min readJan 18, 2022

The ROI of email marketing can be 122% or more without a doubt. But it’s possible only if you do it correctly. The foundation of any email marketing strategy is the email list, which should be clean and deliverable. The first thing you must do is email validation. But what is email validation? What are its benefits? And how to do it correctly?

I’ll help you answer all these questions in this post. You’ll get started with a bang in email marketing, even if you’re a beginner. So let’s get started right away.

What is email validation?

So you made a great effort in collecting email addresses using different ways. And you sent an important email to the vast contact list. But you just came to know that most of the contacts were not even valid. Maybe some of them aren’t correctly formatted.

The solution? Email validation, of course. It’s a process of verifying an email address to confirm its validity and existence. It also ensures if the email address is deliverable and has a reliable domain such as Gmail. But why must you do the email validation?

Why You Must Validate Email Addresses

Let’s suppose you have collected email addresses and run an email campaign without email validation. You’ll get hard bounces for invalid email addresses. And the existing email recipients will get their emails, right? Wrong!

Hard bounces impair your sender’s reputation, and a poor reputation means decreased email deliverability. So even if some email addresses exist, you’ll not be able to deliver the email to their inboxes. And that may be a big problem for an entire email marketing team.

These are some of the top reasons you must validate your email list:

- Decrease hard bounces

- Avoid risky email addresses

- Improve primary inbox deliverability

- Get to know the accurate marketing data

- Boost your reputation

- Get rid of spam complaints

- Stop check-all and temporary accounts

- Increase the engagement rates

- Enjoy the low-cost email marketing

And the list goes on. Thankfully you don’t need to do the email validation continuously.

Do it only if:

- You get new recipients added to your list

- Your bounce rate increases

- Or you get low open rates

But do it at least once a month, even if nothing terrible happens. Doing the email validation regularly ensures you have a clean deliverable email list.

Now that you know the basics of email validation and why you must do it let’s understand how it works.

How Does Email Validation Work

Email verification and email validation are similar, but the former is more complex than the latter. Email validation consists of a process of improving your email deliverability. There are tons of ways of validating email addresses.

But generally, you start with spell check; make sure you have not misspelled anything. And then hunt for spam traps. There are tons of email addresses created to capture senders who aren’t following the best emailing practices.

ISPs (Internet Services Providers) and ESPs (Email Service Providers) make sure you don’t have those email addresses in your list. Or else they’ll block you.

The next thing you’d like to do is check the format of your email addresses. Ensure you don’t miss any @ symbol in your email contacts. For example, email validation tools or services must catch if an email address is like mike@mike@dd. Do the syntax checking properly.

Also, email validation works like individual mailbox validation. It uses the SMTP protocol to ensure if a mailbox exists for a particular address.

Let me summarize and create an email validation checklist for you:

- Check the spellings

- Do the syntax validation

- Hunt the disposable email addresses

- Monitor the DNS behind the contact

- Ping the email box

Email validation takes a second if it’s done correctly with software or a bunch of codes. There are tons of free and premium tools to validate your email list on the go.

However, you can do it manually, which may take a long time. And if you’re like me, you should dig deeper into the subject, especially if you’re a beginner.

How to Verify Email Addresses Without Sending Emails

An email address consists of an @ symbol, a dot, and ASCII characters. The first part has private information, and the second one has the domain name in which the email is registered. Let me get more detailed here.

The first part of the email address contains:

- Uppercase and lowercase alphabets like A, b, c, and more.

- Special symbols like @, _, — or more.

- Full stop, dot, etc.

And the second part of the email address contains:

- Dots

- Hyphens

- Digits

- Letters

These are the examples of valid email addresses:

- john@umbrellamarketing.com

- blogger@abc.news.net

- hellow@mywebsite.com

While the examples of invalid email addresses include:

- john.me..098@thissite.com (consecutive dots aren’t allowed)

- rohan@.bbb.com (no domain begins with a dot)

- tony()$%^@mylife.com (go for characters, underscore, dash, and digits only)

- promise.funtylife.com (there must be an @ symbol)

- myname@abcd.e (.e is an invalid domain name)

If you want to validate your email list manually, it will take tons of time. You cannot validate individual email addresses. The best way to do it is with JavaScript code. This code confirms if the email addresses are valid.

// Code Snippet

Function EmailValidation(enteredEmail)
{var mail_format=/^w+(?W+)*@W+(w+)*(.w{2,3})+$/;
if(enteredEmail.value.match(enteredEmail))
{
alert(“Yeah! a valid email!);
document.form1.text1.focus();
return true;
}
Else
{
alert(“Invalid Email”
document.forum1.text1.focus();
return false;
}
}
And if you want to use JavaScript in HTML, use the code below. And save the file ending with .html

email validation in JavaScript

Enter the email address for validation

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That’s just it! You can write short JavaScript code to check the fundamental errors in email addresses, even as a beginner. But if you don’t have a coding background, you may want to hire a developer for that. Or else go for the email validation tools.

Email Validation Tools and Services

There are tons of email validation tools and services in the market right now. All of them have different top features. Some validate one information, and some do other. Here are the top free email verification tools.

ZeroBounce

It’s one of the most popular email verifying tools used by companies like TripAdvisor. ZeroBounce provides multiple verification processes. It does the single and bulk email validation and also provides you with crucial customer data.

Pricing: ZeroBounce offers monthly 100 email validation for free. If you want to go for more, the pricing starts from $39 to $249 per month. You need to call them for pricing if you want everything unlimited.

Free Bulk Email Validator by H-Supertools

For using this tool, you need to create an H-Supertools account. You can verify 20 email addresses at one time and 200 email addresses per day. It’s worth it because it helps you do the bulk email validation without spending your fortune.

Pricing: The tool is free forever and is supported by ads.

EmailListVerify

It’s one of the most popular email validation tools in the market used by companies like Shopify. According to them, they’ve validated over 5 billion email addresses by now. It does seamless integration with third parties and different file formats.

Pricing: Usually, EmailListVerify charges $0.004 per email address validation. But they roll out some significant discounts every month. So, don’t forget to check that out.

Conclusion

Invalid email addresses bring in a bad reputation for your company or domain name. You’ll also waste a lot of time and resources in email marketing because of the high bounce rate. So the first thing you need to do after you collect some email addresses is validate them.

The process of validating email addresses is called email validation. It involves checking the spellings, format, and syntax of your email contacts. And it also includes looking up the DNS or pinging the email box.

I have already given the JavaScript and HTML code for email validation. But if you are a beginner, go for the top email validation tools or services. Validate your email addresses with Email Validator by H-Supertools if you don’t want to spend bucks.

That’s it! Next time when someone wonders, “What is email validation?” Take charge and start explaining. Have questions? Let me know in the comments below. I’ll try my best to answer all of them.

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