Quick Email Address Verification: The other day, I found myself in an interesting situation. I wanted to get in touch with the VP of marketing of a local company and all I knew was that their company email addresses ended with @companyX.com. I had a hunch that this person’s email address adhered to one or four common email-address conventions, but couldn’t be sure. My experience has been that most company email addresses are built accordingly:
To verify that I was correct, and to ensure that I wasn’t targeting the wrong person or sending my message blindly into the ether, I set out to find a good, free email verification tool. There are actually several sites out there that allow users to validate emails for free. Here is a breakdown of the free tools that have risen to the top of the search heap:
http://www.verifyemailaddress.org/
http://www.email-unlimited.com/tools/verify-email.aspx
The tests I ran on all of these programs yielded the same results. However, there were some features that distinguished the good from the bad—namely the number of addresses you can validate in one sitting.
Of these programs, I liked www.verifyemailaddress.org the best. These folks pay at least some attention to usability, allow you to verify lots of addresses (some sites only allow 5/hour), and don’t bombard users with ads. All and all, not bad. If you’re working in a company and want to scrub the email addresses in your database, this site also offers a bulk verification tool (not free). Here is a screen shot to demonstrate the look and feel of the site:
Tools like these are incredibly useful for librarians, CI analysts, sales people, or anyone else who wants to reach out to an expert, potential client, or anyone with whom they are not immediately connected. I suggest keeping verifyemailaddress.org in your back pocket, should the need to figure out someone’s email address ever arise.