Businesses often have sensitive data in their inboxes such as vendor logins, financial information, or customer records. Hackers know that if they gain access to an employee’s inbox, they can steal the company’s data and use it for illegal activities. For this reason, implementing two-step verification — or multi-factor authentication (2FA/MFA) — is one of the best ways to protect an inbox from data breaches. Email verification is another crucial step that companies can take to strengthen their inbox protection.
The benefits of business email verification
Email validation helps improve the deliverability rate for your emails by removing inactive and invalid addresses from your list. Invalid emails are a major cause of bounces, which trigger spam filters and hurt your sender reputation. Email validation also helps you stay compliant with data protection laws by ensuring that you only send to verified emails.
There are many different types of business email verification techniques, ranging from basic manual checks to more advanced, granular methods. Performing an MX check—which involves checking the mail exchanger (MX) records for an entire domain to confirm that it can receive emails—is a good start. More in-depth methods can include checking for a catch-all address, detecting spoofed email addresses, and using the SMTP handshake to verify that the server is actually accepting emails.
Using an Email Data Enrichment Database to Uncover Deeper Insights
Another common technique is to scan for role-based email addresses, which are addresses that manage general inquiries or issues, like sales@ or support@. If too many people are sending messages to these addresses, it could result in a high volume of complaints and get your IP blacklisted by email service providers.
