Email Verifier

An email verifier, or email checker, is a tool to validate that an email address exists and can receive emails. Email verification is important before contacting new recipients to avoid bounces and protect your sender's reputation.

Hunter's Email Verifier does a complete check of email addresses, verifies if it appears publicly on the web and returns the sources.

No, Hunter's email verification service doesn't rely on sending actual emails to the addresses being verified. Instead, we connect to the recipient's SMTP server to verify the address.

This is the list of email validations performed by the Email Verifier:

• Valid format: First, we validate the format of the email address is correct and looks something like email@provider.com.
• Gibberish email address: We check to ensure the address doesn't look like a fake email address. For example, 1e49cs1pb6@company.com doesn't pass the test.
• Disposable email address: We check if the email address has a domain name used for temporary email addresses.
• Webmail email address: We verify if the email address uses a webmail service like Gmail or Yahoo.
• Presence of MX records: We check if there are MX records on the domain. If there aren't, the email address can't receive any emails.
• Presence of SMTP server: This check is successful if we are able to connect to the SMTP server (indicated in MX records).
• SMTP check: We test the email address and see if its server is willing to accept emails for the address (without sending an email.)
• Accept-all domain: We check if the server has a accept-all (catch-all) policy that accepts all the email addresses.

If you recently verified an email address with Hunter's Email Verifier and it was verified as 'valid', then it's safe to use. We usually observe a bounce rate lower than 1% for these email addresses. However, email verification can never prevent all emails from bouncing, because the existence and validity of the recipient address is not the only factor for why emails bounce.

When you perform an email verification, the result might be 'accept-all'. Some email servers accept emails sent to all email addresses, whether they have actually been created or not. In these cases, the Email Verifier can't confirm if the tested email address actually exists and returns the accept-all status.

These email addresses are less safe to use than the email addresses verified as 'valid'. To decide whether to use them, you need to evaluate the level of risk you're willing to take.

For moderate risk, we recommend selecting only the highest-quality email addresses by using the confidence score returned by the Email Verifier. For example, you can keep only the accept-all email addresses with a confidence score higher than 80%.

Yes, you can verify a list of professional email addresses with the Bulk Email Verifier. Hunter will run the same email verifications on your entire email list.

Yes, Hunter's Email Verifier is free to try, and users on a Free plan can validate up to 50 email addresses per month. If you need more email verifications, please check the pricing for more information.

When logged in, one verification costs one credit, except when we fail to verify the email address.