What is a Valid Email? And How Can You Tell?
Collecting leads and subscribers isn’t just about creating a form on your website and leaving it there. There’s a lot more that goes into it. From asking the right questions in the form to making sure you can catch fake accounts and spam emails. But one thing email marketers encounter quite frequently is fake emails.
Sometimes these can be easily detected, thanks to an email checker (or another tool), but you should still be able to tell a valid address from a fake one.
So, today we’ll see what a valid email address looks like and what are some ways to recognize the fakes.
What’s a Valid Email Address?
All email addresses contain three key components:
- Username: each email has a unique username, like janedoe55
- Symbol: the @ symbol comes after the username
- Domain: the symbol is followed by a domain name, which can be something like gmail.com, or a personalized business domain name.
However, just because an email address is syntactically correct it doesn’t mean that it’s valid. Maybe Jane Doe left the company or simply stopped using that email address.
Spammers and fraudsters have also gotten better at tricking email providers and people, so it’s not always easy to identify which email is correct. Luckily, we’re now moving to the part where we’ll tell you about some neat ways to detect invalid emails.
How to Detect and Remove Invalid Emails
The simplest way to check if an address is valid is to email it. If it bounces – you know where you stand. Unfortunately, this approach isn’t always practical, plus it can hurt your sender reputation in the long run. And if your sender reputation is bad, your email campaigns will be automatically filtered as spam.
Another thing you can do is manually ping an email address behind the scenes. However, this process is lengthy and complicated. Especially if you’re planning to ping thousands of emails. Email pinging works, it’s accurate, but there’s an easier way to do it.
Email verification platforms, or email checkers, are very popular among email marketers, and for a good reason. They help automate the email verification process and make the email list cleaning and filtering simple and quick.
A good email checker integrates into your process seamlessly. You can use it within the subscription form to nip it in the bud. But you can also bulk verify your existing lists to make sure all your contacts are valid. Some email checkers even integrate with emailing platforms and do the address verification automatically.
Wrapping Up
Ensuring that your email lists are free of invalid emails is the best way to make your campaigns profitable, your sender reputation intact, and that you’re actually reaching the right audience.
And while there are many more ways to tell if an email is valid or not, an email verification tool is definitely the easiest solution you can use. We recommend you look for this service, test it out, and see what it can do for you.