How to Verify Email Address Without Sending an Email

Email verification helps you find out if an email address you plan to use is valid, and email verification tools do so without sending any actual emails.

Verification is particularly vital if you send a large volume of emails because you can spot and discard invalid or risky email addresses, protecting your sender reputation.

But how can you actually verify if an email address is valid without having to send a test email?

Option 1: Use an email verifier

The easiest way to verify an email address without sending an email is to use an email verification tool like Hunter's email checker , which automatically runs multiple technical checks on the address to know if it exists and can receive your emails.

An email verifier performs email address validation on multiple levels, which would take time and effort to verify manually – especially if you have hundreds or thousands of addresses to verify.

Best of all, using a verifier doesn't require any technical skills and gives you a clear answer in no time.

Here’s how to verify an email address using a verifier:

If you have a single address to validate, use the Email Verifier (for free + no signup necessary). Paste the address and click "Verify" – you'll see the results in seconds.

You can also use the Bulk Email Verifier if you have a list of addresses to verify.

In this case, you'll need to enter multiple email addresses manually or upload a .TXT or .CSV file.

Once your list is verified, you can download it and check the verification status of each email address.

The Email Verifier will assign one of several statuses to the email addresses you validate.

Let’s take a look at these statuses and what they mean:

Valid

“Valid” means the email address passed all verification checks. You can use these email addresses safely – they can still bounce, but not because you used the wrong email address.

Invalid

The “Invalid” status means the email address cannot receive emails.

You should avoid sending any emails to an invalid email address. They will always bounce back.

Accept-all

Accept-all (sometimes called catch-all) is a server configuration that allows receiving emails to a particular domain even if an email address associated with that domain doesn’t exist.

An accept-all configuration is commonly used by businesses to ensure they receive all emails that are sent to their domain (even if the sender makes a typo) and by big companies to prevent unsolicited emails.

Since it’s a complex topic, we have a different article on using accept-all email addresses.

Unknown

You may see an “unknown” status when Hunter fails to verify an email address.

As you did for the accept-all email addresses, you need to assess the risk to decide whether you will use these email addresses. However, the bounce rate of unknown email addresses is generally higher.

You should also consider trying to verify the “unknown” addresses again after a couple of days – the reason why this status comes up is that some email servers greylist Hunter’s Email Verifier, temporarily blocking it from validating a given email address.

How email verification works

Verifying an email address is a multi-step process. Different verifiers may use slightly different methods; below, I will list the checks performed by Hunter’s Email Verifier:

Syntax and formatting check

A syntax and formatting check is typically the first step for most verification services. That’s because it’s an inexpensive, simple method to discard the most obviously invalid addresses from your email list.

Email addresses must follow complex syntax and formatting rules. For example, they can’t contain multiple “@” characters.

If a given email address doesn’t pass the syntax check, it means it can’t exist, so email verifiers will mark it as invalid.

Gibberish (random character string) check

Especially if you have a form to collect newsletter subscribers, you’ll likely have some gibberish email addresses on your list.

These addresses may sometimes be manually added to your list by people who aren’t really looking to subscribe or by malicious bots.

Many online services create temporary or disposable addresses, which often contain gibberish characters. These addresses aren't safe to contact because they're very likely to bounce.

Email verifiers can analyze your email list to identify these addresses as invalid quickly.

Address type check

While not every email verifier runs this check, it’s essential to know if the given email address is used for professional purposes or not.

At Hunter, we believe email outreach should target professional rather than personal email addresses. That’s why our Email Verifier checks the type of email addresses you verify and marks webmail addresses (like @gmail.com or @outlook.com) as “Webmail.”

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We don’t categorize personal email addresses as invalid, because they can be ethically used, e.g., in newsletters. But we still let you know they’re personal so you can avoid targeting them with cold emails.

MX record check

Every email address can be associated with a domain: ziemek@hunter.io is associated with the domain hunter.io.

However, domains don’t really send and receive emails. Instead, they can be associated with email servers that provide email services on their behalf.

It’s possible to check whether or not a given domain is configured to send and receive emails by looking at its DNS records. If a given domain doesn’t have an MX (mail exchanger) DNS record pointing to an email server, it means it won’t be able to receive any messages you send its way.

This is why email verifiers perform a DNS lookup to check for valid MX records. If the domain isn’t associated with an email server, then any email address registered on that domain will be marked as invalid.

SMTP tickling

One final verification method involves connecting to the recipient’s email server and “asking” if it will accept emails sent to the address.

This method is known as "SMTP tickling" because it uses the SMTP protocol to reach out to the recipient's email server and see how it will react.

Depending on how the email server is configured, this process can have three outcomes:

The email server can confirm that it will accept emails sent to the address being verified—in this case, the address will be marked as “valid.”
The email server can reject emails sent to the address because it doesn’t exist – in this case, the email address is “invalid.”
Finally, some email servers are configured as “accept-all” and respond positively whether or not the given email address exists. In this case, we’ll inform you that the email address is accept-all.

Option 2: Use a search engine

If you don't want to use an email verifier, you can try looking up the address on Google, Bing, or a different search engine.

This method won't work well for more obscure addresses, but some addresses are likely to be featured on many web pages, and you may be able to find them with a simple search.

Keep in mind that even if you find the given address, it doesn't really verify whether it's safe to contact. It can only give you some confidence that the address existed at some point in time, and the more recent the online mentions are, the more likely it is to be still active.

Using the Email Verifier, you'll still surface online mentions to get the extra confidence, but you'll also run multiple other checks to see if the address is currently functional.

Option 3: Check for a People Chip in Google Sheets or Gmail

Google introduced a feature called Smart Chips into several services, including Gmail and Google Sheets. One of the Smart Chips types is People Chips, which transforms an email address into a profile with additional information, including a profile picture and name.

This feature can be used to verify some email addresses, too.

When in Gmail, you can compose a new email with the email address you want to verify as the recipient and hover over it. If a People Chip is displayed, then the email address should be safe to use.

You can do the same by right clicking on a cell with an email address in Google Sheets, then selecting Smart Chips -> Convert to people chip.

However, Hunter’s Email Verifier performs a verification using a similar mechanism in an automated way, so you can just as well default to using Hunter for this.

Option 4: Send a test email (not recommended)

Unless you want to build your own email verification app, your final option is to actually send an email to the address in question.

However, I wouldn't recommend it. The whole point of email verification is to mitigate the risk of your message bouncing back.

If the email address is valid, your recipient will receive the email. But if it isn't, it will bounce back, which will negatively impact the deliverability of your emails in the future. That's because email bounces are a major negative factor for your sender reputation.

Not to mention the fact that you're essentially spamming people's inboxes by sending those test emails.

Wrap up

Whether you're sending a regular newsletter or a cold outreach campaign, you should ensure all the email addresses on your list are valid. This will help increase your delivery rate and protect your sender reputation.

Since verification is something you should do regularly, using an email verification tool would be your best bet to automate this work and run everything on autopilot.