How to Check a Business Email Address Before You Send

Every email that bounces is a small mark against your sending address. A few are normal. A steady stream tells mailbox providers you are mailing a list you did not check. The cure is not a magic verification service. It is a few cheap checks and one firm rule.

The rule: do not guess addresses

The tempting shortcut is to try info@, hello@, owner@ or firstname@ on the business's domain until one does not bounce. Do not.

• Guessed addresses bounce often, and each bounce counts.
• Some reach a person who never agreed to hear from you.
• It makes your list look like what it is: not collected from anything the business published.

Use an address the business itself published: on its website, its contact page, its listing. If it published none, do not email it. Call, use the contact form, or send a message on a channel they list.

What you can check for free

1. The shape. One @, a dot in the domain, no spaces or stray punctuation. Many bad addresses are typing errors.
2. The domain has a mail server. A domain that accepts mail has MX records in DNS. If it has none, nothing can be delivered. This is a real, cheap check, and it removes dead domains.
3. The domain is the business's, not a free mailbox, when you can tell. A published [email protected] is usually a better sign than a free webmail address, though plenty of good small businesses use webmail.
4. It is not a role address you should avoid. noreply@ and donotreply@ are not read.
5. The site is alive. If the business's website no longer loads, the mailbox may be abandoned too.

What no free check can prove

A mail server that exists does not prove the mailbox exists. The only way to find out for certain is to send a message, or to open a conversation with the server and ask, which many servers answer falsely or refuse and which can get your own address blocked. Treat any claim of "100% verified" with suspicion.

So accept that some addresses will bounce, and make that cheap.

Keep bounces low and learn from them

• Send small batches first. Ten messages tell you more about a list than a thousand.
• Watch the bounce rate. Keep it under about 2%. Above that, stop and look at where the addresses came from.
• Treat the two kinds differently. A hard bounce ("no such user", "no such domain") means never write there again. A soft bounce (a full mailbox, a temporary refusal) deserves one retry later.
• Never re-send to a hard bounce, from any campaign.
• Read the notice. A message that says the recipient's server refused you for spam reasons is about you, not the address.

Remove duplicates and the unreachable

The same business often appears twice: once from a map and once from a directory. Write to it once. A second message from the same sender to the same address within days looks like pressure.

How this works in AyePin

AyePin only uses addresses a business published on its own website or listing, and never guesses one. Before it drafts an email it checks the shape and that the domain has a mail server, skips duplicates, and does not draft for an address it already wrote to. It reads the mail server's bounce notices, never writes again to an address that does not exist, and pauses sending by itself when too many messages come back. A failed lookup never blocks a draft on its own: "unknown" is not treated as "bad".

Next, the CAN-SPAM checklist and how to warm up a new domain.