Three work colleagues discuss spam email checker strategies in front of a computer.

3 Ways a Spam Email Checker Helps Your Email Marketing

A good spam email checker improves the health of your email list and allows you to reach your customers. Read on to learn how an email verifier works and why it’s wise to clean your email list regularly.

Email is an effective marketing tool, but pressing the Send button is only the first step in reaching your audience. Around 16% of all emails go to spam, while more than 30 billion bounce daily

How do you avoid landing in spam or bouncing? Keeping a fresh email list is a must.

Email checkers can identify risky addresses you can remove to improve your email deliverability. Learn what a spam email checker is and how it can help you succeed with email.

What is a spam email checker?

The term “spam email checker” can have several different meanings. 

In most cases, it’s referred to as an email checker or email verifier. When you send emails to your list, you must ensure that the addresses on the list are still valid. 

A spam email checker is an online service that determines whether or not one or more email addresses are valid. If some of your data is invalid or fake, you can prune it out so subscribers can see your messages in their inboxes.

Screenshot of spam email checker ZeroBounce with elements of purple and white.
If you send mass emails, validating your contacts is a must. It doesn’t require much knowledge, and you can start immediately.

What does a spam email checker do?

Spam email checkers greatly help any email program by identifying various harmful data. This includes bad and invalid emails that will hurt your email deliverability, which measures how many of your emails hit the inbox. 

Sending emails without removing bad data will diminish the efficacy of your email marketing.

Try the ZeroBounce free email verifier

Let’s look at the bad data an email checker can root out.

Invalid emails

These emails were either invalid from the get-go or went out of use since you acquired them. One thing is certain: they’ll bounce back and tarnish your reputation. 

Inactive emails 

Someone regularly checked these email addresses, but they have since stopped. These dormant – and potentially abandoned – emails affect your overall engagement and can also bounce.

Abuse emails 

They belong to people prone to marking you as spam because of carelessness or malice. Spam complaints cause your emails to land in spam for everyone.

Catch-all emails

Administrators set up catch-all emails to accept any emails sent to them, even when the address doesn’t exist. Companies sometimes set up their domains as a catch-all to ensure they get all communication. However, these emails are prone to bouncing. 

Role-based addresses 

These include emails like info@ office@ or mail@. A team of people tends to check these email addresses. As a result, there’s little to no chance of conversion, and there’s a high likelihood someone will mark you as spam.

Spam traps 

Anti-spam organizations and others set up spam traps to lure and trap spammers. However, there is frequent collateral damage to people like you. There are several types of spam traps – and they’re all risky to your email deliverability. 

Disposable emails 

Suppose you have a free gift, like an ebook or white paper, that you’re using as an incentive to subscribe to the newsletter. Some people only want your freebie, and that’s the end of their interest in you. So, what do they do? They get a temporary email address, so they don’t need to give you their actual address. That email will be inactive in a day or even hours.

Screen shot of email scoring page on ZeroBounce contains element of young man in pink shirt.
Not sure how to handle your catch-all results?
Try running them through ZeroBounce’s email scoring service and find out what score they get.

Three ways a spam email checker helps your email marketing

As you have seen, an email checker removes more than invalid accounts. It also helps your business in more than one way. Let’s go into the ways it will help your email marketing.

#1. Removing bad emails saves on your marketing costs

One overlooked way a spam email checker will help your email marketing is by saving costs. Email service providers charge based on volume – your number of subscribers and the number of emails you send. You’re throwing money out the door when you send emails to invalid or low-quality addresses. It’s not just that keeping bad data is expensive but also costs you in other ways.

Keeping undesirable email addresses on your list leads to email deliverability problems. It prevents you from reaching your customers. Anything that stands in the way of you reaching your customers puts a damper on your earning potential. It can take a lot of work to calculate just how much of a hit your ROI takes. 

#2. It improves your sender reputation

Internet service providers (ISPs) look at your sender reputation to determine where your email will go. It’s how an ISP knows to send a spam message to the junk folder and the email your best friend sent you to the inbox. 

The only problem is that this system isn’t perfect. For some, you could send legitimate emails and have them land in the junk folder or, even worse, not get delivered. 

How does that happen? It’s primarily because of a sender reputation that falters. 

When you use a spam email checker, you eliminate all of those caustic and invalid emails that lower your sender reputation. A good sender score means more people see your emails, and your chances of success grow.

#3 It boosts your email deliverability and sales

The most significant advantage of using a spam email checker is that your deliverability will increase. Arriving in the inbox is the only place an email marketer can be seen and make a sale. No matter how clever or enticing your emails are, if they’re dumped into the spam folder, that’s the end of the line.

When you verify your email list, you take things to the next level by engaging only with real, active email addresses. Cutting bad data lets you increase sales because you’re eliminating dead leads. Instead, you’re focusing on real prospects who are likely to convert.

As you can see, using a spam email checker is more than just a wise play. It’s essential if you want to get anywhere with email marketing.

MediaShares CEO Gene Massey shares how ZeroBounce's email verifier helped his company's email marketing
See how ZeroBounce’s email verifier helped our customer Gene Massey of MediaShares fix a high bounce rate.

How to use a spam email checker

You now know that email validation is necessary for anyone sending mass emails, but how do you do it? There are two modes – and they’re fast and simple!

Bulk email verification

This is the first line of defense. A bulk spam email checker scrubs your entire list. Once you upload your email database onto the platform, it identifies the invalid or harmful addresses for you to remove. ZeroBounce scrubs 100,000 emails in about 45 minutes.

Spam email checker API

In conjunction with a bulk verifier, a spam email checker API will go a long way in keeping your list pristine. Once you’ve cleaned your list, what is to stop bad data from infecting it through your sign-up forms? Again, without an API, there’s a good chance this will happen.

If you’re validating your list quarterly or monthly, you may think that you’re in the clear. Regular bulk validation is undoubtedly a step in the right direction, but you’re leaving the door open for low-quality emails anywhere you have a form. 

Suppose you’ve got several sign-up forms in a variety of places. Signing up to your list should indeed be easy, but there must be safeguards to prevent some negative possibilities.

Typos

Sometimes, a subscriber types in “john@outook.com” instead of “john@outlook.com.” Connecting a spam email checker API to your form alerts them to the mistake in real time. Otherwise, if those emails get on your list without correction, they will bounce, and the subscriber will think you never sent any emails.

Bots

They find forms and infect them. Bots are especially harmful to your email hygiene. They are fake and will prevent legitimate subscribers from getting your emails.

Unscrupulous competitors

Believe it or not, some people will purposefully add spam traps or other destructive data to a competitor’s form. They do this to try and derail their rival’s email marketing efforts.

How do you prevent bad data from getting into your email database? The only way to handle this is to use a spam email checker API at all entry points. You can easily integrate the API into any form you have.

Is it time for an email list scrub? If unsure, read about the most common signs that your database needs cleaning.

Would you like to connect the ZeroBounce email verification API to your forms? It’s easy – just get your API key. For any questions, our team is available 24/7. Reach out via the live chat!

Learn more about our email verification API

Frequently asked questions about spam email checkers

What is a spam email checker? 

A spam email checker is an online service that identifies harmful or invalid data on an email list. It helps you ensure more emails get delivered to the inbox instead of landing in spam.

How do I check a spam email address?

There are two approaches to checking if an email address is spam or valid. The first method is bulk verification. You upload an email list to the platform of an email verification service. The software identifies and removes invalid contacts. The second method is using a spam email checker API, which you can connect to any forms requiring an email address. It will check spam emails in real-time.

How can I check if my emails are going to spam?

Using an inbox tester is the best way to see if your emails will go to spam. This service allows you to send a test email to various mailbox providers worldwide. That way, you’ll know in advance if your emails will make it to the inbox, land in spam, or won’t be delivered at all.

Can a spam email checker help your email marketing?

A spam email checker helps your email marketing by increasing your email deliverability, eliminating the chance that your sender reputation declines, and giving you more opportunities for engagement. Using a spam email checker is instrumental in getting a higher ROI.