5 Best Ways to Build a Valid Email Address List
Individual email addresses are worth nearly $50 to businesses, each.
Imagine if the emails end up in spam folders or they are never delivered. That’s a lot of lost money for a business. More importantly, it affects email deliverability and can result in poor ROI. To achieve a higher email deliverability rate, building a valid email address list is critical. It refers to gathering the right email addresses; addresses that are structured correctly, active, and verified.
How do you add valid email address to your email list? The answer lies in using the double-opt-in method, verifying recipients, and maintaining regular hygiene. The most important of the three is list-cleaning. At Campaign Refinery, our clients get access to an automated list-cleaning feature that detects invalid email addresses and removes them. Before we elaborate on this exclusive feature, let’s go through helpful information about building a valid email address list and the importance of domain validation for senders.
What is a Valid Email Address List?
Since people started using emails, customers receive tons of unsolicited emails, emails they didn’t sign up for. Although it may not seem like a big deal, buying email lists and emailing without consent is, in fact — spam, and soon will be banned from Gmail and Yahoo services. The best way to steer clear of spam traps is to know which valid email addresses to use for your email marketing campaigns.
A valid recipient address list consists of active email addresses; and these email addresses belong to email subscribers who willingly signed up to receive your emails. These are the only email addresses you should ever use in email marketing.
A valid email address has two components:
- Username,
- Domain name.
For example: username@domainname.com
What Makes a Valid Email Address?
A valid email address must adhere to the formats set by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards, such as RFC 5322. At a high level, a valid email address has a local part and a domain name and follows the rules for each component.
We’ll review more valid email address examples to help you pick the right format for your own.
| Category | Example of a valid email address | Invalid Email ID Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Standard format | divyashakthi@campaignrefinery.com | divya.campaignrefinery.com |
| With numbers | user123@example.net | user12*@example.com |
| With hyphens | jane-doe@my-domain.org | Janedoe-gmail.com |
| With underscores | divya_shakthi@example.com | divyashakthi_gmail.com |
| Subdomain email | support@mail.example.com | support^mail.example.com |
| Country code | user@example.co.uk | user@uk |
| Short username | doe.com | Doe com |
| Long username | divyashakthiprabhakaran@example.co.in | divya…shakthi@yahoo.com |
| Plus address | john.doe+newsletter@domain.name | john+doe+gmail.com |
| Dash in domain name | contact@my-company.com | contact@my- – – company.com |
Despite a huge number of linguistic variations, not all email address formats are acceptable, and usually, there are specific email address requirements to meet.
General Email Address Requirements
| Component | Syntax Requirements | Valid Email Address Formats |
| Username | ‣ Latin Characters ‣ Numbers (0-9) ‣ Underscores, periods, and dashes. | ‣ stephen.sam@domain.com ‣ sarah_parker55@domain.com ‣ jen-joe656@domain.com |
| Domain name | ‣ Must contain at least two characters: .com, .org, .cc ‣ Latin characters (a-z) ‣ Numbers (0-9) ‣ Dashes (not to be used at the beginning or end). | ‣ fills@domain.org ‣ doe@mail-provider.cc ‣ jane@companywebsite.com |
Note: At Campaign Refinery, we know the importance of sender reputation; that’s why we insist our clients use valid email address lists and have a strict policy against spam. Accounts with spam complaints above 0.1% will be automatically suspended. In line with this policy, cold emailing is prohibited.
While you must pay attention to the syntax, it’s equally important to understand how to use valid email suffixes as part of an email address. For example, a valid email suffix will be “Campaignrefinery.com.”
Email Suffix List
The prefix is the part of an email address that comes before the “@” symbol, and the suffix comes after it.
To help you understand better, here’s a table of valid and invalid suffixes examples.
| Type | Valid Email Suffix | Invalid Email Suffix |
|---|---|---|
| Common | @gmail.com@yahoo.com | @gmail@yahoo |
| Corporate | @company.com@business.org | @company@business..org |
| Country code | @domain.in@company.co.uk | @example.uk@domain..in |
| Educational | @university.edu@college.edu | @university@college.edu.. |
| Government | @govt.au@state.gov | @.travel@example |
Sometimes, users may add an extra symbol or misspell phrases that will make the email address invalid. This can make it challenging to build a list of valid email addresses. To help you out, we’ve compiled the best approaches to assist you in dealing with the complexities.
Building a Valid Email Address List: 5+1 Best Methods
Sending a valid email helps increase trust in your business. When you validate subscribers’ email addresses, you have a list of active emails, ensuring your messages reach the right people. Additionally, you can be certain that your email lists are verified and clean.
1. Obtain Permission — Opt-in and double opt-in
Subscribers opt out or mark emails as spam when they haven’t signed up to receive your emails and still keep receiving them. These incidents occur because they weren’t presented with any opt-in options, the best one being the double opt-in forms.
Obtaining permission to send your emails to a recipient’s address is a critical step in email marketing. Once people sign up for your list, an automated email sequence will send them the confirmation link, adding another step as an additional layer of consent.
This method is quite the opposite of forwarding an email and hoping more people take action. You typically target interested audiences and build a fair email list.
2. Email Address Validation
Even when the recipients’ email addresses are formatted correctly, it doesn’t mean they are valid. They may be inactive or the email provider has shut down all operations.
A valid email address is required to contain a local part and domain part spelled correctly. In this case, the best solution is to check if the email address is active on the internet through a process called email validation.
The email validation process gives you insights into the recipients’ domain status, so MX records and syntax checks of the email address should be obligatory. Not validating recipients’ email addresses can make it challenging to grow email lists the right way.
3. Use Email Verification Tools
When performing manual checks, testing a single email address is easier than testing bulk addresses. To test a single address, send an email to a specific address and wait for the status.
However, bulk testing can become complicated due to a larger list and email infrastructure issues. Under these circumstances, using an email validation tool will be the best choice. It’s a one-step process, and these tools are quicker in validating email addresses.
We’ll review the best email verification tools for 2024 in the section below.
4. Monitor Engagement
Engagement refers to the percentage of email open rates, click-through rates, spam complaints, and click-to-open rates on emails. Except for spam complaints, a higher percentage in the key performance indicators (KPI) indicates higher ROI.
Monitoring these email campaign metrics will give you a glimpse into the delivery rates, allowing you to identify inactive email addresses. For example, if your open rates are low, there is a possibility that the emails haven’t been delivered because of invalid email addresses.
5. Clean up and Update the Email List
Email lists are your most valuable asset. Having a clean and updated email list means more engagement and higher ROI. Cleaning your lists starts with removing invalid email addresses, correcting typos, and eliminating role addresses. It also helps to remove merged or duplicate email addresses (people who have signed up twice).
This way, when email clients queue your messages in the outbox, it becomes easier to send them without getting error messages.
Through this process, two important steps are:
- Respect your recipients and allow them to unsubscribe easily so they will remove themselves at will.
- Identify the inactive addresses that need to be removed and delete them from the list.
6. Use Campaign Refinery’s Automatic List Cleaning Feature
Cleaning your email lists removes unwanted and old email addresses, keeping your list fresh and relevant. We understand the importance of email list quality and the sophistication of its maintenance, especially if you’re a large sender. That’s why we created the automatic email list-cleaning feature that removes harmful emails before sending them.
Campaign Refinery clients report an increase in deliverability rates of up to 6x using this feature.
We believe the tips above will assist you in developing a useful email address list. If you prefer working independently, we have more reasons to tell you about the importance of email domain validation and verification tools.
Best Email Verification Tools in 2024
Let’s review the top email verification tools in 2024 to help you build a valid email address list.
1. Zerobounce
ZeroBounce helps users improve inbox placement by allowing them to maintain email list hygiene. The tool immediately validates the email addresses upon entering the database, eliminating invalid emails.
The verification tool also provides an AI score of how email marketing subscribers interact with your marketing emails.
2. Hunter.io
Hunter.io helps you find relevant email addresses from your target industry. Users can search by name or domain to find out the required information. You can also validate a single email address or an entire email list.
The Chrome extension allows you to find and verify email addresses right from the website.
3. Kickbox
Kickbox helps users prevent hard bounces and block incorrect signups. It offers a drag-and-drop interface and real time API. You can validate email addresses in real time, preventing invalid addresses from entering your database.
4. Emailable
Emailable offers bulk list verification and HTTP API that helps you integrate with your email marketing CRM. Users can add it to their websites for real-time validation.
The verification tool also offers email deliverability tools to test score and improve email performance.
5. Bouncer
Bouncer ensures accurate email list verification through data accuracy and compliance. The email validator can run tests up to 250,000 emails at once. The tool also shows temporary email addresses and spam traps.
Like validating email addresses, you must also ensure there’s a valid email domain. The email domain connects the second part of the email address, directing the emails to the correct inbox.
Why is Email Domain Validation Important For Senders?
Sender’s domain validation is a critical component to establish reliability as a sender. While you need to perform checks on recipients’ email addresses, it’s equally important to validate your domain for increased ESP authority.
Here are additional reasons why email domain validation is important:
- Higher deliverability: Validating your domain ensures your emails reach your customers, ensuring higher email deliverability, while keeping your sender reputation clean.
- Engagement: Higher deliverability is a result of better email engagement. And better engagement is a result of having lower spam complaints and a better domain reputation. All of these things happen when you validate your email domain.
- Compliance: When you are a large sender, validating your email domain helps maintain a good sender reputation and adheres to GDPR. It also prevents your domain from phishing attacks and data breaches and helps you adhere to email security best practices.
- No blacklists: Validated email domains will never see the dark of blacklists or spam folders. You’ll also be able to manage bounce rates and improve the overall email performance.
- Increase in trust: When your domain is not validated, there’s a high chance that
- your customers might lose trust in your brand because of the spam they receive. By validating your domain, you will build credibility and keep the trust in place. Better Inboxing: Validating your email domain helps to improve the ability of your emails to reach inboxes. With better reach, you’ll see more opens and clicks. We sure do know the importance of domain validation and email list hygiene; that’s why we have a dedicated team focused on ensuring our clients’ domains are authenticated! As for the email list hygiene, our exclusive ‘automatic list-cleaning feature’ takes care of that.
Domain validation and email list hygiene are some of Campaign Refinery core values, so we dedicated s team that ensures our clients’ domains are authenticated! As for the email list hygiene, our exclusive ‘automatic list-cleaning feature’ takes care of that, and here’s how.
To help you score well with your email marketing efforts, here are our top-performing posts for reading:
If you need professional tools and expertise to scale your email marketing, Campaign Refinery can help.
A Sophisticated Way to Build a Valid Email Address List
Pruning your email list is challenging, especially when you have a huge list of recipients. But with the right features and tools, you can build a clean email list and get higher deliverability rates.
A simplified approach to this is Campaign Refinery’s automatic list-cleaning feature. Although we say ‘automatic’, our clients still control the cleaning process. By default, the email lists will be cleaned every 90 days from the last cleaning date. However, clients can also manually adjust the email cleaning schedule on the platform, anywhere between 30-180 days.
This post will help you build a valid email address list and improve your email deliverability rates.
To help improve your email deliverability, we present you with The Inbox Formula: a comprehensive guide on best practices and industry secrets that guarantee a clean email-sending operation and improved deliverability.
Interested? You can get The Inbox Formula today completely free of charge!
We know it works — try it and let us know how much your open rates increased!
FAQ
1. What is a valid email format?
A valid email format consists of three main parts: the local part, the domain name, and the “@” symbol. For example, “username@domain.com.”
The local part can be up to 64 characters long and contain letters and special characters. The domain name can contain letters, digits, or hyphens. Both the local part and the domain name are case-sensitive.
2. What are valid email format examples?
Every valid email address must contain an email prefix and a domain name that follows the precise format. For example, “john.doe@example.com” or “admin@support@campaignrefinery.com.”
3. How to create a valid email account?
The first step to creating a valid email account is choosing a reliable email service provider, such as Gmail or Yahoo. Go to the provider’s sign-up page and fill in the details, verify your identity, and accept the terms and conditions to get started.
4. What is a valid email ID?
A valid email ID contains a local part, and a domain name, separated by the “@” symbol. The total length should not exceed 320 characters (255 for the domain and 64 for the local part).
5. What is a valid email address?
A valid email address has a username and a domain name, helping you reach the right recipients. Any typo or missing information in the email will cause emails to bounce.
6. How can I make my email address valid?
To ensure your email address is valid, format the emails properly, avoid invalid characters, use a real domain, and check for typos. It’s always best to register the email with a trusted email provider.
7. What are valid email domains?
A valid email domain usually meets the following guidelines—the domain name must be 255 characters long, it must be separated by DNS labels, and end with a top level domain, such as (TLD).
8. What is a valid work email address?
A professional work email address will contain the name of the business and the domain. For example, “divyashakthi@campaignrefinery.com.” A valid work email address follows the same rules as a general email address.
9. How to validate a list of email addresses?
You can use a combination of methods to validate a list of email addresses, such as syntax checks, domain verification, MX records lookup, and manually sending a test email to verify the identity.
10. How to know if your email list has an active email address?
The best way to ensure your email list contains only active email addresses is to use an email clean-up tool. Simultaneously, you can verify the email engagement metrics, monitor bounce rates, and check for spam traps.
