Email Verification Checklist
A complete checklist for verifying email addresses before outreach. Reduce bounce rates, protect sender reputation, and improve deliverability with these steps.
Overview
Sending to unverified emails damages your sender reputation and kills deliverability. This checklist ensures every email in your outreach list is validated before a single message is sent. Follow these steps to maintain bounce rates below 3 percent.
Pre-Verification Checks
Before running emails through verification, perform these basic hygiene steps. Remove obviously invalid formats like missing @ symbols or misspelled domains. Strip personal email domains like gmail.com and yahoo.com unless you are targeting sole proprietors. Remove role-based addresses like info@, sales@, and support@ that rarely convert. Check for and remove duplicate email addresses across your list.
Run Scrapine Verification
Upload your email list to Scrapine’s verification engine or enable automatic verification on enriched leads. Scrapine checks MX records, SMTP responses, and mailbox existence without sending an actual email. Each address receives a status: valid, invalid, risky, or unknown.
Interpret Verification Results
Valid emails are safe to send. Add them to your outreach list. Invalid emails should be immediately removed. They will bounce and damage your reputation. Risky emails have uncertain deliverability. Send to these only if you have a warmed-up domain with good reputation. Unknown emails could not be verified. Treat them as risky and send in small batches to test deliverability.
Set Quality Thresholds
For cold outreach, only send to lists with 95 percent or higher valid email rates. If your list falls below this threshold, enrich additional contacts to replace invalid addresses. For existing customer communications, the threshold can be lower since you have established relationships.
Post-Send Monitoring
After your first send, monitor bounce reports closely. If any verified emails bounce, flag them and remove from future sends. Track your domain reputation using tools like Google Postmaster. If bounce rates creep above 3 percent, pause sending and re-verify your entire list.
Ongoing Verification
Schedule monthly re-verification of your active email lists. Email addresses decay at 2 to 3 percent per month as people change jobs and companies change domains. Scrapine’s scheduled verification catches these changes automatically so your lists stay clean.