What Is an Email Checker?

Make sure the emails on your list work so your messages get delivered.

Email checkers ensure that an email address actually works — and belongs to a real person. They can also act as a spam email checker, detecting email addresses that were created to catch spammers, but don’t belong to an actual person.

Why use an email checker?

You want the emails you worked hard to produce to reach the right person. Valid, working email addresses are key to email delivery.

Sending marketing emails to valid email addresses also reduces your risk of bounces, spam complaints and falling into spam traps.

• Email bounces. A bounce is when a marketing email is not delivered to the intended recipient. Bounces are typically classified in one of two ways: soft or hard. Soft bounces indicate the recipient’s email was valid, but their mailbox may have been full, the server was down or the message exceeded size limits. Hard bounces occur when a message is sent to an invalid email or nonexistent email address.
• Spam complaints. Everyone that sends emails has a sender reputation, which impacts email delivery. If you receive a lot of complaints, your email service provider could suspend you, and mailbox providers will start directing your campaigns to the junk folder. The accepted industry benchmark for spam complaints is 0.1%.
• Spam traps. Spammers scour the internet and scrap email addresses, compiling them into lists that they eventually sell. To prevent fraud, internet service providers and blacklist providers create fake email addresses and post them in public digital spaces (like blogs and forums) to catch and block spammers. If you’ve ever purchased an email list (which we don’t recommend), it could be filled with spam emails. When you use that list to send emails in your email marketing platform, you might get flagged. On some platforms, three flags within a six-month period is cause for suspension. However, the system won’t tell you which emails are spammy or how many total bad emails you need to weed out.

Spam email checkers can help you reduce these risks, protect or improve your sender reputation and give your emails the greatest chance of being delivered.

How can I check if an email is legitimate?

It’s not easy to spot a fake or spammy email on your own. However, typos are one potential sign. Usually, the typos are found in popular domain names, such as gmail.com, hotmail.com or yahoo.com. The domain might be one letter off, such as “yhoo.com.”

In some instances, these misspelled emails may be typo traps set up to catch spammers who create email lists scrapped from the internet without the recipients’ permission. In other instances, a real person may actually have made a typo when completing a form — or they did it intentionally to avoid being contacted.

Email lists can contain thousands of recipients — or more. Sifting through each one and analyzing it would be very difficult.

You’d also run the risk of deleting an email that was actually a potential lead, creating missed opportunities.

That’s where email checkers come in.

How does an email checker work?

Every email checker works a little differently. At ZeroBounce, we make it easy for you to get the job done, so there are only two simple steps:

1. Create a free account and upload your existing list to the ZeroBounce platform. Make sure it’s a .CSV, .TXT or Excel file. Rest assured, our system is secure. Like military-grade secure. For added protection, files are automatically deleted after 30 days — or you can delete them sooner.
2. Download your new clean email list. Download your new clean email list.

We take care of the in-between.

Once you upload your email list, ZeroBounce verifies it. After you download your clean list, you can use it confidently.

What to look for in an email checker

To find the right email checker, look for a few key attributes.

Most importantly, your email checker should be accurate. Make sure that it has a high percentage rate of accuracy.

Second, your email checker should remove more than just invalid email addresses.

It should also remove:

• Abuse emails (belong to people who often mark emails as “spam”)
• Temporary emails (which become invalid after a set period of time)
• Spam traps (like the typo traps we talked about earlier)
• Role-based emails (think contact@domain.com, which are checked by many people)

Third, it should offer a real-time API. As someone enters their email into a form on your website, your email checker’s API should authenticate that email right then and there. This helps prevent invalid emails from ever landing on your list.

Finally, your email checker should be secure. You want military-grade security for your data. Also, check to ensure they’re General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), SOC 2 and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant.

How can I check a valid email address for free?

Maybe you’re a small business owner with a small, but growing subscriber base. Or you’re a sales rep that wants to confirm a prospect’s email before you reach out.

ZeroBounce offers two options to check a valid email address for free:

1. Check individual emails. ZeroBounce offers a free email verifier tool. that allows you to check emails as you go.
2. Check emails in bulk. Each month, validate up to 100 emails on your list. It’s the fastest way to keep your list clean.