How EmailRazor email validation technology works

Understand whether an email address is valid or not is a tricky business, that's why EmailRazor performs a multi step process to validate each email address.

Formal validation

First step is about validating the formal correctness of the email address: there are invalid combinations of characters that immediately say an email is not good.

Specific domain rules

Some domains have their own rules about how a valid email address is. Example: Yahoo does not allow email addresses start with a number. EmailRazor extensive database of specific domain rules can catch this kind of problems.

Role accounts

A role email addresses (like info@, staff@, sales@) is an address that is not associated with a particular person, but rather with a company, department or group. These addresses are not intended for personal use as they typically include a distribution list of multiple recipients. These kind of addresses are not usually good in a business to consumer email campaign. EmailRazor has a huge database of typical role based accounts and will mark those kind of emails so you can easily decide whether you want to use them or not in your campaigns.

Domain verification

A domain can receive mail only if it is registered on Internet DNS and has mail exchanger (MX) nodes defined. EmailRazor checks each email domain to verify it is configured to receive emails. EmailRazor domain verification also includes a check of the following informations about the destination domain:

SMTP check

If everything looks good in formal verification and Domain verification, EmailRazor tries to "ping" the email domain and find out whether the destination mailbox actually exists. EmailRazor does NOT send an email to the email address during this check, but this operation is the most closed one to the actual email sending. In this step EmailRazor can also find out whether there are temporary conditions that prevent the mailbox from receiving emails, for example if it is full.

Quality Score

Even if an email looks good and pass SMTP Check, it is possible it is not good to use in an email campaign. It can be a role email, the domain can be a catchall domain preventing a real verification of the address, it can have temporary problems in receiving emails or simply a weird account name. EmailRazor will consider all this factors and compute an overall email quality and deliverability score in a range between 0 (bad) an 1 (good). Usually we suggest to not include in your campaigns emails with a quality score under 0.4.

Output file

EmailRazor will provide you the result of verification process in a CSV file you can open with Excel or import in your sending platform. See more details about EmailRazor output files.