What is a Bulk Email Verification Service?
Bulk email list verification – an indispensable tool for companies sending mass emails – determines whether or not a list of email addresses is fully valid and deliverable. The process involves an address-by-address analysis of each email on an uploaded list and is offered as hosted software.
How Does Email Address Verification Work?
The legitimacy of an email address can be measured through a combination of validation techniques and – depending on the internal database – proprietary algorithms.
At the end of the email checking process, any invalid addresses will be filtered out, leaving a clean, fully deliverable email list ready for marketing and business requirements.
Below, we’ve explained in detail just how the email validation process – essentially, a process of separating the wheat from the chaff – works.
- Email Address Syntax Check: This removes improperly formatted email addresses, according to IETF standards.
- Domain/MX Records Check: This verifies the DNS entries of an email address. If a domain is found to be invalid, or an MX entry is missing, this process marks the corresponding email address as invalid.
- Role-Based Account Detection: Email sends to role-based accounts such as postmaster@, info@, sales@, admin@, etc., can negatively impact your deliverability and even put you in denylist with some ISPs. This process detects and flags such addresses.
- Disposable Email Address (DEA) Detection: Throwaway/disposable emails, or “junk collector” emails, are detected and processed appropriately. These are temporarily created emails and used for signup forms or bypass login forms requiring a valid email address.
- Honeypot/ Spam Trap Detection: This detects spam seeds, BOTs, honeypots, blacklisted, or bogus email addresses by checking the addresses in the list against the known list of emails/domains, used for trapping spammers.
- Checking DNSBLs and URI DNSBLs for blacklisting: A DNS-based blackhole list (DNSBL) or Real-time Blackhole List (RBL) is a list of IP addresses often used for spamming. A URI DNSBL is a DNSBL that lists domain names that have been found in the body of spam email messages but generally have not been found inside legitimate messages. In the process, emails and IP addresses are checked against known DNSBLs and URI DNSBLs to trap spam networks.
- Final Verification: This phase performs deep-level extended SMTP verifications on each email address. The software will ping the emails to check mailbox existence without sending an actual email to the inbox.