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Growing the email list has become an essential part of every successful business. It allows the business to advertise new products or services to previous customers, or even gain new customers through growing the email list with lead magnets (Read our full lead magnet tutorial). But growing your email list requires a very important process called email validation, it makes sure that there are no bad effects from growing your email list.
In this article, we will discuss email validation in-depth, we will go through why is this process important and why is it dangerous to not implement it, and we will go through the different available solutions to implementing this process.
What is Email Validation?
Email validation is the process of detecting invalid and undeliverable email addresses for the purpose of not accepting them for further use. An Email address can be invalid for multiple reasons, the user might have entered an email that does not exist due to a typo, or in other cases, the domain of the email might not exist at all, and these cases are detected more easily.
Why is Email Validation Important?
One of the most important key performance indicators in an email campaign is the email bounce rate. The email bounce rate is the percentage of emails that are sent and were not delivered to the inbox of the recipient's email address.
A high email bounce rate is considered a big indication of the low quality of the emails sent from a certain email address in the eyes of the email service provider (ESP). This might lead to your domain name or IP address getting blacklisted, which would make your ESP send your future emails directly to the spam folder of the recipients until your domain and IP address are removed from the blacklist.
Types of Email Addresses that you want to filter out.
There are multiple types of email addresses that we want to remove from our email lists before sending our campaigns to not cause any harm.
1. An address with an invalid string.
These are email addresses that don't follow the format example@domain. This type is the easiest to detect as it can be checked easily with some simple pragmatical rules or with a regex expression. This type also includes domains with a TLD that doesn't exist.
2. An address with an unexisting domain.
This type is detected when the email domain is seemingly valid, but the problem is that it's not hosted anywhere meaning that it doesn't exist.
3. Undeliverable Email Addresses.
Undeliverable Email addresses are the ones where emails can not be delivered to their inbox. This can mostly occur due to server failure along with many other reasons that are beyond the purpose of this article.
4. Spam-trap Email addresses AKA honey pot Emails.
These email addresses are created for the sole purpose of detecting and monitoring spammers. They are mostly developed and maintained by internet service providers to identify domains and IP addresses that don't follow Email guidelines and best practices.
5. Disposable or Temporary Emails.
These emails are offered by some services for users to use for some time and terminate them. If we add this type of email to our list, we would get much higher bounce rates as these emails are terminated soon so our emails won't reach their inbox.
How to validate email addresses?
To validate an Email address, you first check if the string of the address is valid by checking if the address follows the format "example@domain", then you check if the domain exists. But this only means that the string can represent a valid email address, but it needs to be validated for deliverability too, which can be handled but requires more use of some technologies.
Luckily, we don't have to go through this process on our own or implement a program from scratch to do so as there are many email validation tools that provide us with all of what we need to validate the email addresses we gather.
Best Solutions for Email Validation.
There are paid and free tools that offer excellent solutions for email validation, and we can also easily implement our own solution to validate email with the use of Regular Expressions. These solutions vary in their accuracy and depth in validating emails, you should read the pros and cons of each one and decide which one fits your needs the best.
I will now list two available solutions for email validation and will discuss the pros and cons of each of them so you can easily compare them and choose the best one for your purpose.
1. DeBounce.
DeBounce is the most reliable Email validation tool out there as it offers the fastest and most accurate results. It implements the most in-depth implementation for checking the validity of email addresses. This tool allows you to detect and remove spam traps and disposable emails to ensure that you run your email campaigns without any risk or worry about sending emails to any type of invalid address. Visit DeBounce here.
This service is paid, but it only costs 0.002 dollars for verification at most, as the cost for verification goes down with the increase of email addresses that are requested to be validated in the deal. For example, if you want to validate 25000 email addresses you only pay 30 dollars (The cost for a single verification has gone down to 0.00012 dollars). Check out their full pricing table here.
2. Regular Expressions (RegEx).
/^([a-zA-Z0-9_.+-])+\@(([a-zA-Z0-9-])+\.)+([a-zA-Z0-9]{2,4})+$/
You can use this regular expression in Javascript as follows:
Where the variable email stores the email string and test will have a boolean value, true if the email is valid and false otherwise.
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