Email validation is one of the most important steps in email list hygiene. Without it, your messages may not reach the inboxes of your recipients or could even end up in spam folders. Whether you collect leads through web forms, social media sites, or even by hand, validating emails is critical to ensure your outreach efforts don’t go in vain.

To validate that email exists, you need to verify that the email address meets several basic requirements. First, you need to ensure the syntax of the email is correct. This is because email servers expect addresses to be correctly structured and formatted in order to deliver messages accurately. To check this, a simple regular expression can be used. This identifies the structure of an email and checks for common errors such as missing @ symbols or spaces. However, this isn’t a substitute for verification that the email address actually exists on the recipient’s mail server.

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Another step in verifying an email is to make sure that the domain name of the email address is valid. This is a crucial step as it can help you spot disposable email addresses that are often used for spamming and other fraudulent activities. To do this, you can use tools such as Clearout which provides an API, JS Widget, and WordPress Plugin to perform real-time email validation.

A final step in ensuring that an email address is valid is to connect with the mail server to confirm that the mailbox is active. While you can perform this by sending a test email to the address, it is more effective to use an online tool such as Captain Verify that combines several methods to verify and identify issues like disposable addresses.