Email verification is one of the simplest ways to protect your sender reputation, improve deliverability, and make sure your emails actually reach real people.
But it’s also one of the easiest processes to overlook or misuse.
Even seasoned senders make avoidable mistakes that end up costing them time and money. Below are some of the most common pitfalls—and how to avoid them.
Never re-verifying email addresses.
Say you create a list of people to contact today, and you immediately verify it. Then, you discard all accept-all and invalid addresses from that list, leaving just valid, deliverable addresses.
After four weeks, 2% of that list will likely be invalid. If you were to send a campaign, 2% of your emails would bounce.
And if more time passes, your bounce rate would definitely increase.
Verify-and-forget is not how you should approach it. Always consider how long it’s been since you last verified your contacts.
As a best practice, re-verify before any large sends. The goal is to keep your bounce rate below 2% in the long term—ideally between 0-1%.
(If you’re on a paid Hunter plan and keep your leads saved in Hunter, they’re automatically re-verified on a monthly basis!)
Conflating valid and accept-all email addresses
For anyone new to email verification, it’s common to use both valid and accept-all email addresses without giving it a second thought.
That’s because when you verify a list of emails (e.g., using Hunter’s Bulk Email Verifier), verification services typically emphasize the risks associated with invalid email addresses, or even discard them outright.
When an email address is verified as accept-all, it makes sense to let you as the user choose what to do with it. There is some risk associated with using accept-all addresses, but it doesn’t mean they should all be discarded at all times.
It’s important that you understand the difference between valid and accept-all addresses so you can make an informed decision on how you’re going to use them.
Delaying verification until after bounces occur
Regrettably, email verification is one of those things you don’t think you need until you do.
It’s common to start looking for an email verifier after your first attempt at mass emails ends with a pile of bounce-back message and getting rate-limited by Gmail.
Case in point: my introduction to Hunter’s Email Verifier was after I purchased a list and sent a pitch to 200+ journalists (manually, which made me gradually lose my mind). I used my main email account, which had sent five outbound emails per week at most before that.
The first 15 bounce-back messages were because the email addresses I used were invalid. And then I started getting rate-limited.
Don’t be like me; verify before you run into issues.
Treating verification as a deliverability fix-all
Email verification is the best way to maintain a high deliverability, but it’s not the only piece of that puzzle.
All it really does is filter out undeliverable email addresses.
But deliverability also depends on:
- Your sender reputation, which is affected by how often your emails are opened and replied to vs marked as spam or automatically filtered into the spam folder
- How warmed up your email account and domain are
- Your email service provider and its email servers
- How many emails you’re sending per day, and how consistently
Verification doesn’t solve these issues in the slightest, which means that your messages can bounce even if you exclusively send to valid email addresses.
Paying twice for the same data
If you buy contact lists, enrich them, or verify addresses using different tools, it’s easy to end up paying to verify the same emails more than once.
This can happen when you:
- Export and re-upload verified data to different tools without syncing verification results
- Forget that your CRM or outreach platform already includes verification in its workflow
- Re-import the same contacts as new records instead of updating existing ones
Keeping your email verification and outreach tools connected helps you avoid redundant verifications. With a Hunter paid plan, email addresses you verify and save are automatically re-verified, and email addresses you find with the Email Finder come pre-verified, helping you avoid these overhead costs.
Verifying everything instead of filtering first
When you verify email addresses in bulk, it’s easy to burn through your verification credits quickly.
Consider which email addresses you’re actually planning to use in the coming weeks. Maybe you don’t need to verify every address you have in your CRM if you’re not going to use it anytime soon.
That said, we recommend verifying email addresses upon finding them just to keep your lead lists tidy.
Not automating verification where possible
Thanks to our API, email verification is a process that you can plug in anywhere you need it.
We also have browser extensions and a Google Sheets add-on to meet you where you work.
If email verification is basic hygiene to help you maintain deliverability and protect your domain, then you should make it a habit, and habits are easier to keep if you make them convenient.
