You don’t want to send an email to an invalid address, so you need a way to verify the email address is actually correct.
Especially if your business relies more on email outreach than any other marketing or sales channel, email verification should be one of the key practices for keeping your email lists healthy and up-to-date.
But if you’re just starting out, getting your head around the many email verification tools out there can be hard.
Worry not. In this guide, we’ve selected five proven email verifiers and tested how accurate, affordable, and effective they are. Read on to see which verification tool best suits your needs and budget.
What Is an Email Verifier?
An email verifier is a software tool that allows you to check if an email address exists and can receive emails.
To verify an email address, these tools use a combination of techniques, such as:
- Syntax checks
- Domain verification
- Role-based account detection
- Greylisting checks
Email verifiers come in all shapes and sizes. Some are available as part of or a module of a bigger software package, such as a CRM or email marketing platform. Others come as standalone tools. Some allow you to check a list or lists of email addresses; others do it one email address at a time.
If you’re using an email marketing platform or a CRM, email verification may already be part of your routine and happen automatically upon uploading the list to the platform. Otherwise, you can upload your list to email verification software before sending out your campaign.
Why Use an Email Verifier?
Before we dive into our review, let’s review the basic reasons why businesses should care about email verification and email list hygiene in general.
#1: To keep your email list healthy
Email verification can indicate which email addresses on your list are no longer valid, outdated, blacklisted, or spam, and as a result, you can clean those emails off your list.
Unhealthy addresses will never receive your email; it will either go into a spam folder or bounce back, so why waste your time and money on them?
#2: To get accurate email campaign results
Invalid emails can lead to all kinds of trouble. One of them is getting inaccurate email campaign results, such as delivery rate, engagement, bounce rate, click-through rate, and others.
If your email list consists of unverified addresses, those rates will all be affected and can lead to wrong decisions and conclusions, even when the headline, the content itself, and the scheduling practices were all met and done correctly.
#3: To keep a positive sender reputation
Another issue that unverified email addresses can bring is damaging your sender’s reputation. Yes, every email owner has one, and so does your company.
If your email list consists of spammy addresses or addresses acquired through unsolicited sources, the emails you send will be reviewed and flagged as “spam” by email service providers (ESP) and, as a result, can hinder your reputation and impact future email deliverability. Again, this could happen even if the content of the email is top-notch.
Best Email Verification Tools
Now let’s take a look at email verification tools that you can try to clean and validate your list.
1. Email Verifier by The Apps Cloud
Email Verifier is a freemium email verification app available through the Semrush App Center.
The app allows for single and bulk email uploads and indicates which emails on your list are verified, invalid, non-existent, catch-all, duplicated, disposable, or unknown.
This real time email verification process takes just a few minutes, and the results are shown in a clear and digestible way. Once verification is done, you can just go ahead and download the new, verified list and clean it off.
Email Verifier supports 100 free email verifications per day and 300 verifications per month. If your list is larger than that, you can upgrade to a paid plan for 10K or 100K email verifications per month for $30 or $149, respectively.
What we like about Email Verifier is that it does exactly what it says. It’s a free email checker with no extra services or add-ons to divert your attention.
Highly recommended if you already have an account with Semrush or need a simple yet fully-fledged email verifier.
2. NeverBounce
Next on our list is NeverBounce. Unlike Email Verifier, this tool breaks down the email verification and cleaning process into two steps.
The first step is called “Clean,” where it analyzes the list and finds duplicated or misspelled addresses. The second step is called "Verify,” where the tool looks for valid, invalid, unknown, or accept-all addresses.
Upon signup, you get ten free credits to verify ten email addresses. After that, if you have more emails to verify, you can buy more credits based on three available pricing plans: Starter, Advanced, and Pro, for 10K, 100K, and 2 million credits, starting from $0.002 to $0.008 per credit.
For instance, if you have 1000 email addresses, verifying them on the Starter plan will cost you $8, and if you have 100K addresses, it’s going to cost $400. If you want to clean your list first, this will also cost an extra dollar or two. For example, cleaning a list of 100 addresses will cost $1.
In addition to cleaning and verifying, NeverBounce offers other features, such as syncing your email provider with the tool for daily automatic list cleaning and integration with other platforms or web forms via custom API, JavaScript, Zapier, or NeverBounce’s API wrappers.
This solution is a bit on the pricier side, but it is great if you need a verification solution that works well with other platforms.
3. ZeroBounce
ZeroBounce offers a wide range of email-related services, such as email finder, email list analyses, email server testing, and email verification too. The tool offers free validation of 100 email addresses without registration and highlights the percentage of invalid, catch-all, abuse, spam trap, and other types of email addresses.
However, to see the actual number of emails in each category, you need to create an account and upload your list once again.
If your list exceeds 100 addresses, just like NeverBounce, ZeroBounce will offer you extra credits, where 1 credit equals 1 email validation. You can buy a custom number of credits or choose from available packages. For instance, 10.000 credits will cost $64, while 100K credits will cost $350.
Just like NeverBounce, ZeroBounce is more than an email verifier, so if you’re looking for a multi-purpose solution that can integrate with other platforms in your stack, give ZeroBounce a go.
4. EmailListVerify
The final email verifier on our list is EmailListVerify. Just like the Email Verifier by The Apps Cloud, EmailListVerify’s main job focus is on email verification and nothing else. And just like all the tools we reviewed before, the service offers free 100 email verifications upon registration.
From our experience, EmailListVerify takes a bit longer than others to process those free emails, but the result is quite similar to all the other services we’ve tested.
The tool offers a nice visualization of the verification results and conveniently emails them along with the cleanup list. As for the pricing, EmailListVerify offers pay-as-you-go options and monthly subscriptions depending on how many addresses you need to check and how often.
For instance, 10,000 emails will cost $24 in one go, while 100K will cost $169. As for subscriptions, the cheapest plan starts at $139 per month and allows you to verify 5,000 emails per day.
Overall, it’s a nice, a bit pricier alternative to the Email Verifier, but convenient if you need to scale your verification quickly.
Say Goodbye to Invalid Email Addresses
And there you have it. Email verification may seem daunting, but it remains an essential process of checking how accurate and up-to-date your email contacts are.
To make sure your email outreach works for you, make email verification part of your email list hygiene routine.