How to Check if an Email Address Is Real Before You Send

Every bad address on a list costs you something. Bounces hurt your sender reputation, throwaway inboxes inflate your numbers, and a typo means a real customer never hears from you. Most of it can be caught before you hit send.

Check it in one step

Paste the address into our free email checker. It looks at four things and gives a plain answer: valid, risky or invalid.

What gets checked

• Format. Missing @, spaces, double dots — the obvious mistakes a form should have caught.
• Typos in the domain. gmial.com, yaho.com, hotmial.com. These are the most common reason a real person's address bounces, and the checker suggests the fix.
• Whether the domain can receive mail. A domain with no mail servers can't accept email, however correct the rest of the address looks. The checker also shows who handles the mail — Google, Microsoft and so on.
• Disposable and role addresses. Throwaway inbox services are flagged as risky, and so are shared addresses like info@ or sales@, which rarely reach a single decision-maker.

What a free check can't tell you

It can't prove a specific mailbox exists. Many mail servers accept everything and bounce later, and probing them directly is unreliable and can get your server blocked. So read "valid" as "nothing wrong with this address", not "a person definitely reads it". The best proof is still a confirmation email the person clicks.

Fix it at the form

The cheapest place to catch a bad address is the moment someone types it. Suggesting "did you mean gmail.com?" on your sign-up form saves more leads than any clean-up later. And if you call those leads as well as email them, the same discipline applies to phone numbers — scrub the list before the campaign, not after the complaints.