Email Checker

Email Checker

You’ve just bought a brand new list of prospective emails to use for marketing purposes, or perhaps you’ve had a form up for a little while collecting potential addresses to use. The problem is that some of those addresses may be invalid – but how would you know? The simple solution is to download an Email Checker. Put simply, these programs will go through a list of contacts and verify that they are indeed valid email addresses. They will also likely allow you to manually check email addresses by hand.

Does it sound too good to be true? It both is and isn’t. Email checker programs work by communicating with the domain’s SMTP server (SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). They then ask the server if the email address provided is valid. So assuming you have john.doe@example.com, the email checker would contact example.com’s mail server and ask if john.doe was a valid user name. It’s a very easy procedure and uses minimal bandwidth.

However, some email servers purposefully try to obscure this information. For example, if you use a popular email address verification service, Hotmail will simply say that you can’t look the information up. Other servers will always report that an address is valid, so that way you don’t know what is and isn’t a valid. By and large, for the vast majority of domains, email checker programs are successful, especially if you run them in-house as opposed to a central server.

When your email list gets to be very big, it’s important to throw out any bad or invalid addresses so that way when your email list is sent they get to the right people. That’s why it is very important that you invest in an email checker that works for your business and for your needs. You can find them fairly easily by going to Google. Many sites will offer the ability to check a few addresses for free and then ask you to pay a monthly subscription fee to be able to access them on a permanent basis. Alternatively, you may wish to consult your mail solutions provider – they may have recommendations on a tool that is most compatible with your business.

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