Email Checker

All you wanted to know about email checkers: definition and principle of work

For everyone working with emails, it is vital to stick to the core issue: deliverability. If you send letters on emails, which bounce them right away or do not accept because they don’t exist, it makes a problem for every sender (especially, for enterprises that have a business model of email marketing in their heart). Also, there may be no human behind this or that email to read it, or an address is fake or just a one-time… With so many reasons for a possible fault of delivering your electronic message to potential readers, you definitely have to use some email validator. So, how to check if an email is valid? There is a guide on email verification specifically for you.

What is an email checker?

Let’s not dive into too tech stuff about email verification process and essence, trying to make our material understandable to a wide circle of readers. So, an email checker is a tool, which is designed to check if some email is okay or not okay. What is included in ‘okay’:

• If the electronic address exists 

• If the domain (mail server) is ready to cooperate during checks, it is able to tell that it specifically has such address, it rejects letters sent to this domain on an un-existing e-address, what kind of domain it is (blacklisted or not, a regularly working host or some dummy one used to make spam sends (email spam test) or to register one-day e-addresses). If a server does not want to cooperate during the check, it is impossible to confirm whether any address exists on it

• If the address is not blacklisted, spammy, fake, one-day, and has a history of using it

• If the address accepts all or not (“accept all” type of address means that any letter sent to a server to any address is accepted and never returned, even if it does not exist)

• If this address has appeared anywhere on the Internet as belonging to someone – like it is used in social media, for instance.

Bear in mind that the list above is what ideally can be included in checks but it will super heavily depend on a specific email checker.

How email checker works?

To make sure that some email is okay or not, an email checker connects to the mail domain and exchanges with it a sequence of commands, defining everything that is told above on the list. After that, it makes the Internet search to collect additional information. Based on all data collected, it defines the goodness or badness of the submitted address, marking it okay or not. Depending on the specific email checker you’re using to verify email, the name for the check may differ – for instance, ‘Valid’, ‘Ok’, ‘Passed’, ‘Existing’ and akin…

What the validity of the checked email means? If it is valid, then with the probability of 95% or higher, your email sent to this address will not be bounced. Thus, you are cleaning your database, sending letters to only those recipients, who are highly likely to read the received letter.

Also, it is important to mention that no email address owner of a checked email will know that his or her email was checked, as email checkers do not send anything on the address itself to check if the email is valid. Also, they do not store the database of checked e-addresses (at least, longer than it is needed to make check and form a report), so owners of those e-addresses will not be confused by finding their emails in someplace online. Nobody will know that you did the check. 

In addition – based on the type of subscription you’re having in this checking tool, there are different opportunities to make checks, from a few checks per 1 hour, to several dozen or hundreds per month, and to millions per day in a batch check. There are free and fee-based subscriptions, where most expensive ones can cost ten or more thousand dollars per 1 huge batch check (and the least expensive are something like a few dollars a month).