Free tool
Email address checker
Catch the addresses that will never arrive - typos, dead domains, throwaway mailboxes - before you send to them. Nothing is sent and nothing is stored.
In short
Enter an address to check its format, whether its domain actually accepts mail, and whether it is one of the two patterns that quietly damage a sender’s reputation: a disposable address or a role account.What the verdicts mean
| Verdict | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Looks valid | Well formed, and its domain accepts mail. Nothing suspicious about it. | Send. Not a guarantee the individual mailbox exists - see below. |
| Invalid | Malformed, or the domain does not exist or accepts no mail at all. | Do not send. This one can never arrive, so fix it at the source. |
| Risky | A disposable address, a role account like info@, or a likely typo. | Think about why it is on your list. Fine for a receipt, bad for a campaign. |
Why no tool can promise an address exists
Plenty of sites will give you a green tick and a confident percentage. Here is what is actually happening underneath, so you can judge those claims for yourself.
There is a way to ask. A sending server names a recipient and the receiving server answers before any message is offered – accept or reject. That is how mail has always worked, and it is what every verification service is doing when it tells you an address is real.
The problem is that the answer is often meaningless. Three situations break it:
- Catch-all domains accept every address, including ones that cannot exist, so they never lose mail to a typo. This is common on company domains - and it means a 'verified' corporate address can still bounce. The server said yes to everything.
- Greylisting refuses any unfamiliar sender on first contact and expects a retry minutes later. A tool in a hurry reads that temporary refusal as a rejection and throws away a perfectly good address.
- Large providers increasingly accept everything on purpose and bounce afterwards, precisely so that this question cannot be used to harvest their users' addresses. That is the system working as designed.
So a single accuracy figure across all addresses is a number that depends entirely on whose domains are in your list. A list of consumer addresses verifies well; a list of corporate addresses behind catch-alls cannot be verified at all, by anyone, at any price.
This checker reports what is knowable for certain and does not dress a guess up as a result. That is a smaller claim than the sites promising 99% accuracy, and it is one you can rely on.
What actually fixes bad addresses
Checking addresses after the fact is damage control. They never enter your list at all if you fix the two places they come from:
- Confirm the address before you rely on it. Send one message with a link, and add the address to nothing until that link is clicked. This is the only method that proves a mailbox exists, because the proof is somebody reading it.
- Suppress on the first hard bounce, automatically. An address that has already failed must never be sent to again - a repeat is read by receiving servers as a sender who is not paying attention.
- Catch typos at the form, not at send time. A 'did you mean gmail.com?' prompt while someone is still looking at the screen recovers an address that is otherwise simply lost.
Sendpository does the second one for you: suppression lists mean one bad address cannot be sent to twice, without you writing the logic.
What this tool does with the address
Nothing you enter is stored, no address is ever contacted, and no mail server is connected to. Every check reads public DNS and stops there, so the person behind the address never learns it was looked at.
It is rate limited, by visitor and by the domain being checked, so it cannot be automated against one organisation. You will not notice unless you are doing something it is not for.
Questions
Does this email exist?
No tool can tell you that reliably, including this one. A mail server can be asked whether it would accept a message for an address, but a large share of company domains are configured to accept every address and sort it out later - so the answer comes back yes for addresses that do not exist. This checker tells you what can be established for certain: whether the address is well formed, whether its domain accepts mail at all, and whether it is a disposable or role address.
How do I check if an email address is valid without sending an email?
Check the three things that are knowable from outside. Is the address well formed? Does the domain resolve and publish MX records, without which it receives no mail from anyone? And is it a throwaway or a generic team address rather than a person? Paste an address above and all three run at once.
What does a disposable address mean?
It is a mailbox from a throwaway service - read once and abandoned. It works today and bounces in a month, and that bounce lands on your sending reputation rather than on the person who used it. Common in signup forms where people want the product without the mail.
Why does it flag info@ and support@?
Those are role addresses: they reach a team, not a person. Perfectly fine for a receipt or a password reset. Risky for marketing, because several people read them and any of them can mark the message as spam, which draws complaints well out of proportion to the volume sent.
Can I check a whole list?
No - one address at a time. This is for checking an address by hand, not for cleaning a bought list, and a bought list is a deliverability problem that cleaning will not fix.
Is anything sent to these addresses?
No. Nothing is sent, nothing is stored, and the people behind the addresses are not contacted in any way. The checks read public DNS and nothing else.
Related
SPF, DKIM and DMARC checker
Check a domain's own email authentication records and see what to fix.
Email deliverability checklist
What actually decides whether your mail reaches the inbox, in order.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained
What the three records do, and the exact records to publish.
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