How to check if an email is valid (5 methods without sending emails + Free tool)

Want your cold emails to land in your prospects’ inboxes?

Then, it’s essential to keep your bounce rate under 5%! (Bounce rate is the percentage of emails that aren’t delivered.)

High bounce rates can harm your email deliverability.

When your email deliverability is compromised, many of your messages won't reach your audience, meaning your email outreach will have a poor ROI.

The key to keeping your bounce rate under control is to only send emails to verified, valid email addresses.

That means you have to verify an email before sending email to it. If you send email to unverified emails, it will hurt your deliverability.

In this article, you'll find 5 proven methods to validate email addresses without sending emails and risking your sender reputation.

Free email verifier

At lemlist, we created a tool to verify 10 emails for free. ⬇️

If you need to bulk verify large lists of emails, check out lemlist’s Email Finder and Verifier. It allows you to find and verify emails for your leads.

Email Finder and Verifier finds up to 80% of valid emails for your leads, whereas other tools only get to 60% or less.

5 other ways to check if an email is valid

1. Check the email address syntax

A valid email address should have the following format:

username + "@" symbol + domain name

✅ peterk@johnconsulting.com
❌ peterk.johnconsulting.com

2. Hover over an email address

• In Gmail:
  
  Go to New message → Add the email address in the recipient area → Hover your mouse over the email address
  
  If the email address is valid, you should get the leads’ full name and image!

• In Google Sheets:
  
  Add the email address to the cell → Hover your mouse over the email address
  
  If the email address is valid, you should get the leads’ full name and image!

3. Search email address on Google

A quick search on Google or social media platforms will show you if the email address is used elsewhere and, therefore, likely legit. ⬇️

4. Check email domain age 👴

Your prospects are more likely to use long-standing domains for work purposes. Newly created domains can sometimes be used for spam or similar purposes.

You can check the age of a domain using a domain checker tool like Small SEO Tools!

5. Use email verifier tools 🛠️

A quicker way to verify emails is by using a bulk email verifier tool.

One of the easiest ways to find and verify leads' email addresses on the market is to use lemlist's Email Finder and Verifier.

It not only finds your leads’ email addresses, but it automatically verifies those emails as well.

Thanks to the waterfall enrichment method, Email Finder and Verifier combines the best third-party data sources to give you 40-55% more valid emails. This is the equivalent of asking 6 different providers for up-to-date leads’ information without navigating and subscribing to multiple apps.

Here's how to do it 👇

How to use lemlist's Email Finder and Verifier

For leads that already have an email address, you can verify their email address with one click.

In the second step of the campaign setup process for your "Lead list" after importing, you will come across the "Set up import settings" section.

Here, you will have the option to choose from various enrichments, including:

If your leads are already in your campaign - select your leads by bulk or one by one, and click on the three dots at the top right to choose "Verify email".

For each lead, lemlist will:

1.➡️ Clean lead's first and last name

2.➡️ Extract and save relevant information from their LinkedIn profiles (if available)

3.➡️ In case more emails are found, keep the best email found for the lead

4.➡️ Display the status of the email

• Deliverable: The recipient's email provider has confirmed that the email address exists and that it is safe to send messages to.
• Risky: The email address has the potential to result in a bounce or low engagement. Risky addresses include those classified as Accept All (accepts all incoming emails regardless of validity), Full Mailbox (mailbox is full and unable to receive new messages), or Disposable (temporary or throwaway email address).
• Undeliverable: The email address is either syntactically incorrect or does not exist.
• Unknown: We did not receive a response from the email provider, so the status remains uncertain.

5. ➡️ If available, save additional information such as phone number, civility, job title, and other relevant details.

By executing these steps, you'll get the lead's comprehensive and accurate information, which will allow you to reach their inboxes and open new opportunities.

In the leads section of your campaign, by hovering above the enrich stats icon, you can see a portion of leads with different statuses in your campaign:

The cost of the following actions:

- Email Finder: 5 credits per lead
- Verify email: 1 credit per lead
- LinkedIn enrichment: 2 credits per lead

New lemlist users receive 100 Free Credits as part of their trial.

Free credits are also included in paying plans, reset monthly. The number of Free Credits varies based on the plan:

• Email Starter: 100 credits
• Email Pro: 250 credits
• Multichannel Expert: 500 credits
• Outreach Scale: 1,000 credits

Plus, users can purchase Additional Credits for $0.01 each. These credits will fully roll over to next month! 🛞

Here's the list of other reliable tools to perform a valid email check:

• Clearout: starts at $7 for 1000 credits
• Bouncer: starts at $0.008 for 1 credit
• NeverBounce: starts at $0.007 for 1 credit
• Emailable: starts at $0.00646 for 1 credit
• TrueMail: starts at $34 for 5000 credits
• ZeroBounce: starts at $0.00225 for 1 credit
• DeBounce: starts at $0.002 for 1 credit

Simply upload your email list to their platform, and they will deliver you a CSV report that labels undeliverable and risky emails to avoid.

Key takeaways

You can spend hours writing perfect emails for the right audience, but if you send them to invalid email addresses, they will never see them.

You will lose time and resources. But the worst part of sending to unverified emails is that it hurts your deliverability.

More and more of your emails will land in spam, leading to a continuously decreasing ROI.

To ensure that won't happen to you, you must only send to verified emails.

To check whether an e-mail is valid, the first step is to find your prospects' e-mails. To do this, you can use our free email finder.