Email address validation is the process of ensuring that an email address is valid and capable of receiving messages. This is important for your business because it helps you to avoid sending emails to invalid addresses, which can damage your reputation and negatively impact the deliverability of your messages.
There are several different email address validation tools available that can help you verify the validity of an email address. These tools will scan an email address for problems, such as syntax errors, DNS issues, and server problems. They will also check if the mailbox is functional and is capable of receiving messages. These services can help to improve the overall quality of your email lists and make it easier to reach your target audience.
Many businesses are relying on email marketing to communicate with their customers and prospects. This means that you need to have an accurate and up-to-date list of email addresses. However, even if an email address is valid, it can still be marked as spam or rejected by email service providers. This can have a negative effect on your deliverability and the ability to contact potential customers or clients.
The best way to avoid invalid email addresses is to perform regular cleaning and maintenance of your mailing lists. In addition, it is a good idea to use a verification service to ensure that any new email addresses you collect are correct and valid. This can save you time and money in the long run, as it will prevent you from sending messages to erroneous or dead email addresses.
Most ESPs and marketing platforms will validate email addresses as part of the signup process. This makes sure that the email address is correctly formatted and is a valid, frequently used mailbox. However, these services will not check whether an email address is actually valid or if it has been blacklisted by any spam filters. This can result in emails being sent to undesired recipients or getting automatically filed into junk folders.
Some web applications will limit the length of an email field by requiring that the string only contains a single @ symbol, a full stop and a standardised suffix. However, this will not prevent users from entering invalid email addresses into the input field.
A reliable email validation API will check an email address against multiple sources and will not impose arbitrary standards, such as string length limitations. Some validation APIs will even check for disposable email addresses, which are temporary email addresses that expire after a short period of time and are widely used by spammers.
By regularly checking the validity of your email address list and using an email validation API, you can keep your marketing and customer communication efforts on track. This will save you time and money by preventing unnecessary bounces, wasted data storage costs and lost opportunities with disengaged customers. It is also a great way to improve your deliverability score with ISPs and prevent your emails from being flagged as spam.