How to check if an email is valid without sending? 6 Proven Ways

Knowing how to check if an email is valid without sending one is key to keeping your bounce rate under 5%! (Bounce rate = undelivered emails).

A high bounce rate damages your email deliverability, reducing your outreach’s ROI.

The solution? Only send emails to verified addresses.

In this article, I’ll share 6 foolproof ways to validate email addresses without risking your sender reputation.

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

VP Product @lemlist | The Cheat Sheet Guy

Stay ahead and protect your deliverability!

1. How do you check if an email address is a valid format?

To ensure an email address is valid, start by verifying its syntax and format.

A properly formatted email address follows a specific structure, including a username, an “@” symbol, and a domain name.

Without this basic structure, the email is invalid and won’t function as intended:

username + "@" symbol + domain name

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

2. Hover over an email address

Another quick way to check if an email address is valid is by hovering over it in tools like Gmail or Google Sheets.

This method often reveals additional information, such as the lead’s full name or profile image, confirming the address is active and linked to an account.

To verify an email address in Gmail, follow these steps:

• Open a new message.
• Add the email address in the recipient area.
• Hover your mouse over the email address.

If the email address is valid, you’ll see the lead’s full name and profile image:

To check email validity in Google Sheets:

• Add the email address to a cell.
• Hover your mouse over the email address.

If the email address is active, the lead’s full name and profile picture will appear:

3. How to Verify an Email Address with Google Search

Performing a quick Google search can help confirm if an email address is actively used.

Simply type the email address into the search bar or check social media platforms.

If it appears in profiles or relevant pages, it’s likely a valid address:

4. Check the 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 fraudulent activity.

You can verify a domain’s age using tools like Small SEO Tools or similar domain checkers to ensure reliability:

5. Use a Free email verifier tool

Verify 10 emails for free with lemlist and ensure they’re valid:

6. lemlist Email Finder and Verifier (Free trial)

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 find 80% of valid emails for your leads, whereas other tools only get you from 15% to 60% of valid emails.

You can enrich leads data by automatically getting all the missing contact information, including verified emails, phone numbers, and LinkedIn info. You can also choose to verify existing emails.

Finding emails directly in lemlist with this powerful feature allows you to:

• Find up-to-date contact information
• Find and clear extra information you don’t need
• Automate your full outreach process
• Natively integrate with lemlist

Need to verify multiple emails quickly?

Try lemlist’s Email Finder and Verifier using the waterfall lead enrichment method.

—a powerful tool that finds and automatically verifies email addresses.

Using the waterfall lead enrichment method, it taps into top third-party data sources to deliver 40-55% more valid emails, saving you the hassle of managing multiple tools.

The Cheat Sheet Guy | VP Product @lemlist

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, and they are reset monthly. The number of Free Credits varies based on the plan:

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

We have a lesson on how to verify emails with lemlist.

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.

Frequently Ask Questions

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.

lemlist team

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