Incorrect or invalid email address checker spam addresses (also known as fake or dead) can cause your messages to bounce, and you’ll lose your sender reputation. A good email address checker software can remove these bad addresses and keep your emails in the inbox, improving your sales and marketing performance.

Some spammers create their own email lists with scraped emails from the internet and use them to spam people, and they often make errors such as misspellings and typos. These errors can lead to hard bounces, and they also increase the likelihood that your recipient will mark you as spam. They may also belong to companies that have set up their domain as a catch-all, which makes them prone to sending emails to people who never signed up and whose emails are largely irrelevant.

Stay Safe: How to Use an Email Address Checker to Identify Spam and Protect Your Personal Information

A simple and free way to check if an email is valid is to create a fake email address with a free provider such as Yahoo or Gmail, then email it. If the message bounces (sometimes it takes up to a day for a hard bounce to show up) then it’s a fake address. This method can be time-consuming if you’re trying to verify hundreds of email addresses, however, and it doesn’t detect disposable or temporary email addresses.

To identify these and other types of fake email addresses, a good email validation tool can scan the syntax of each address and confirm that it follows the standard format. Most email verification tools also detect role addresses and flag them as invalid. By regularly checking your email lists for invalid, obsolete, or spammy addresses, you can improve your deliverability and reduce the number of unwanted emails sent to people who never wanted to hear from you in the first place.