Whether you are working on link building or affiliate recruitment, you want to know if the recipient’s email address is intact before sending out that message of yours. After all, unless one has valid contact information at hand, how can he expect to make the contact?
There are numerous email verification tools out there. Some (like the Atomic Mail Verifier, for example) charge you a one-time fee, others (like BriteVerity) tie their pricing to the number of email addresses you’ll be verifying, and when you are attempting to validate email addresses in bulk, these are certainly great ways to go.
However, when recruiting affiliates, reaching out to influencers, or potential link partners, we often end up verifying emails one by one. For this task you do not have to invest anything beyond your own time and effort. Here are the three tools that will help you verify email addresses free of charge:
IP Tracker’s Email Lookup
This email lookup tool provides live verification of emails using three simple steps: (i) verifies the host name (SMTP server), (ii) validates the email address sending a HELLO command to the SMTP server, and (iii) confirms (or denies) email validity.
MailTester.com
Mail Tester follows the traditional way: “looks up the SMTP server responsible for the e-mail address, and tries to establish an SMTP connection. It then tries to send several commands, almost as if an e-mail is going to be sent. When enough information is gathered, the connection is aborted.”
Rapportive
This is my favorite tool of all! Brought up by SEOgadget’s Richard Baxter during his Search Marketing Day presentation in Madrid last week, Rapportive does something that neither of the above two tools do — it looks up people’s social media profiles to check if the email address you’re checking is linked to any of them. Through trial and error you can arrive at the exact email addresses that people use.
Have I missed a good tool for email address verification? Please post about it below.
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awesome. now i can check any email before sending.
Thanks for the post! I want to say that I did not use any of the resources offered, as I have been working with Proof.io for a year now, a reliable tool with a very low price for services.
Even though it isn’t free, if you have to validate a larger number of emails going free won’t show good results and getting bounces is very bad for your reputation, Personally I would recommend Zerobounce for those who need to validate larger amounts of email for campaigns.
Other than that great article!
Another one great solution is TrueMail.io. Convenient, easy and fast email verification tool. By the way, it has free trial and you can verify your first 1000 emails for free.
This is interesting, Alona. I’ve never heard of TrueMail, and appreciate you mentioning them here.