Every company which deals with email marketing should validate its contact list from time to time. For this purpose, you should use special email validation services. Here’s what email validators help you do:

Check the correctness of the email syntax: for example, you can find domain spelling errors, missing “@”, and delete such addresses.

Find and replace duplicate emails.

Detect spam traps and remove them. Spam traps look just like normal email addresses, but if you send an email to such an address, email services will consider email marketing campaigns from your domain as spam.

Reveal contacts with a big number of spam complaints from them.

Detect disposable email addresses, i.e., email aliases for users’ real addresses. Nobody reads any emails in such mailboxes.

Find role-based addresses, i.e. addresses associated with a certain company or position, not a person. Such addresses have high unsubscribe and complaint rates.

Check mail eXchanger (MX) records in the addresses' domains. A domain without MX can't receive emails.

Check for an SMTP connection with the recipients' servers that shows if their accounts really exist.

Detect contact activity/inactivity — whether the subscriber is currently using the given mailbox.

This is an incomplete list, but nevertheless, it demonstrates well how many dangers there are in an unvalidated contact list. Especially if you’ve collected contacts offline — through questionnaires, surveys or flyers. Or if there was no Double Opt In enabled.

Using bad contact lists can lead to:

Useless waste of money,

Falling into an email blacklist,

Damaged sender reputation,

Ban in your email service provider.

There are many services to validate email lists, but we have collected the best.

An online verifier that enables you to check your email lists in TXT and CSV formats.

Advantages: the service finds the missing information about email contacts, such as their first names, last names, gender and geolocation. ZeroBounce support is ready to assist you 24/7.

The pricing for 100k emails is $385. You can check up to 100 emails for free.

Features:

Removing addresses with hard and soft bounces,

Cleaning contact lists from spam traps and contacts with a high level of spam complaints,

Finding additional information about contacts.

QuickEmailVerification offers verification of email lists in real time. This includes the ability to connect the validation tool to the registration form by API.

Advantages: real-time email validation.

The pricing for 100k emails is $320. You can check up to 100 emails for free.

Features:

Checking the correctness of the address syntax,

Detecting contacts with a large number of spam complaints,

Revealing role-based addresses,

Finding disposable email addresses,

Detecting suspicious domains.

DeBounce is a simple, fast, and accurate email validation and verification platform which providers a deliverability guarantee of 97.5%. It has validated more than one billion email addresses so far and earned a 5-stars rating with more than 420 unique reviews on TrustPilot.

Advantages: DeBounce offers more than 30 integrations with popular email service providers. There is no need to manually updates your email lists on your ESP. DeBounce updates your email lists directly from its dashboard with simple clicks.

Pricing: The pricing for 100K emails is $90. You can check up to 100 emails for free.

Verification includes:

Remove Invalid Emails

Disposable Email Checker

Catch-All Domain Checker

Syntax Eliminator

Anti-greylisting Technology

Spam-trap Removal

Team Account

TheChecker is an affordable and reliable email verifier, investing heavily in infrastructure and cutting-edge technologies to make email validation accurate and fast. They are trusted by users in over 170 countries, including noted Enterprise customers such as Netflix, Mojang, Alibaba, amongst others. They have a free real-time verification feature that can be installed on your form pages easily.

Advantage: You can use online Bulk Verification or Single verification. Clients with larger amounts of emails can set up their API which is easy to install. For real-time verification (JS Widget), a piece of code can be included in your landing pages to reduce invalid emails entering your list at the time of capture. Furthermore, team members can all access the same account and credits.

The pricing for 100k emails is $139 and you can get 100 credits for free on sign-up. The premium version of JS Widget costs $4.99 per month.

Verification includes:

Syntax check,

Duplicates,

Disposable, catch-all and role-based email addresses,

Non-existent and inactive domains

MX-records,

SMTP verification

Voila Norbert offers a powerful yet affordable email verification tool that uses advanced algorithms to weed out unresponsive domains, removing duplicate entries and incorrect emails. It can clean your email list in just a few minutes. Large enterprise companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Intel, Oracle, and Twitter have all used the platform.

Advantage: You can use Voila Norbert's email verification tool anywhere without having to install any software. All you have to do is to go to their website, upload your list in a CSV format or copy and paste your straight to the tool, and the software will do the rest for you.

Pricing: Unlike many email validation services, Voila Norbert uses a pay-as-you-go model. It charges only $.003 per address up to 500K addresses and $.001 per email beyond that limit. To use bulk validation, you need a minimum $2 spend, or around 667 email addresses.

Verification includes:

Duplicates,

Syntax validation,

Domain verification,

Inactive, invalid and parked domains

Inactive email addresses,

Disposable, catch-all and role-based email addresses,

SMTP verification

A validator with the ability to check MX records.

Advantage: the original numeric contact rating system. Typically validators segment contact list into 3 main groups:

Active,

Conditionally valid,

Invalid.

MailValidator works in a similar way, but with a more detailed gradation. All contacts have the rating:

over 0.70 — active,

between 0.70 and 0.40 — conditionally valid,

under 0.40 — invalid.

This way, you can determine the boundaries of the contact quality on your own.

The pricing for 100k emails is $200. You can check up to 100 emails for free.

Verification includes:

Syntax,

MX-record,

Spam traps,

Disposable email addresses.

BriteVerify aims to ultimately simplify the validation process for your contact list. For example, you can drag and drop the list of contacts right into the check window, or import it directly from your ESP.

Advantages: the ability to enable validation for subscription forms via the API. The service offers support via the phone in the USA and Great Britain.

The pricing for 100k emails is $1000. A free trial is available.

Verification includes:

Syntax,

Role-based addresses,

Сontacts with a large number of complaints,

Disposable email addresses,

Suspicious domains.

Mailfloss integrates with MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, HubSpot, Constant Contact and many other ESPs. In just a few clicks, the service will connect to your account validate your contact list on a daily basis.

Advantages: you don't need to export contacts from your ESP, upload them to the validator, and remove invalid emails manually, then upload the validated list into ESP again. The entire process is streamlined thanks to the integrations.

The pricing for 100k emails is $150.

Verification includes:

Syntax,

Role-based addresses,

Сontacts with a large number of complaints,

Disposable addresses,

Suspicious domains,

Daily validation schedule,

Ability to customize all the functionality.

EmailMarker is one of the oldest and most credible email validators. The service validates emails in real time via the API.

Advantages: 24/7 support by email, phone or chat.

The pricing for 100k emails is $161. You can check up to 100 emails for free.

Verification includes:

Syntax,

Duplicates,

Spam traps and complaining contacts,

Non-existing and inactive domains,

Addresses with bounces.

Xverify is a multifunctional system for the validation of email addresses, physical addresses, and phone numbers.

Advantages: the ability to add validation to subscription forms using the API, 24/7 support.

The pricing for 100k emails is $400. You can check up to 100 emails for free.

Verification includes:

Syntax,

Duplicates,

Spam traps and complaining contacts,

Disposable addresses.

Hubuco is a fast and reliable British system for email validation.

Advantage: 7 times faster than the competitors’ validation speed.

The pricing for 100k emails is $175, with a free trial.

Verification includes:

Syntax,

Duplicates,

Disposable and role-based addresses,

MX-records,

SMTP verification.

Email Checker provides a real-time email verification API.

Advantages: a user-friendly dashboard with drag and drop functionality.

The pricing for 100k emails is $299.

Verification includes:

Syntax,

MX records,

Online protection from dangerous and invalid addresses via the API.

eSputnik is, above all, a marketing automation software, not a validator. But there's also a number of free email validation features, such as:

Verification of email syntax;

Removing duplicate email addresses;

Checking for blacklisted addresses.