We are sentheng an e-mail message and we want to know, before sentheng, if the recipient's address is valid; in other words we want to verify the existence and valithety of an email address with a simple one checks email.
On top of that, we often receive emails from recipients we don't know and don't trust. Phishing attempts are not uncommon and it is also not thefficult to create an anonymous email or generate a temporary email address.
Check if an email really exists or not, is an activity that even marketers have to do every day to promote products or contact new customers.
In this guide we will see several useful methods that allow you to check if an email really exists. First, we will start with various online services that do the work for us, until we see how you can manually verify an email email account with methods within the reach of the most savvy and advanced users.
1. Verify an email address with online services
Taking advantage of the services made available online, we can simply write the "suspicious" email address or our recipient's email address, to get useful information on the existence or not of a real email address. Each service described here allows you to check if an email address really exists.
Verify the email with my-ip.eu
Verify email address with my.ip.it
Toolset for checking e-mail address
Email Checker.net
Verify Email.org
gmail-yahoo-or-outlook-email-address">2. Verify a Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook email address
We dethecate a paragraph to some "tricks" (actually quite trivial) for verifying the existence of an email, if the address used is @ gmail.com, @ yahoo.it or @ outlook.com / @ hotmail.com .
These methods are mainly used to try to trace the address of a person whose name and surname we know and who typically uses name.surname@gmail.com or similar variants.
gmail
Yahoo! Mail
Microsoft Outlook
3. Verify an email address by searching the Internet
If the online check through the proposed sites is not enough for us and we want to obtain more specific information even knowing that an email address exists, maybe giving a face to the email address that we want to check, the simplest method is to do research on Google and Facebook.
We insert the email therectly on Google:
We might be surprised at the results we can get from this simple search. There are many clues and information that we can obtain by exploiting the power of a search engine.
Even easier to locate someone and find out if the email address corresponds to a Facebook account. Once entered on our profile, we enter the email therectly in the search bar of Facebook:
There are also other "social" services: a very powerful tool that looks for on all social networks is Pipl. With this site it is possible to perform a "blanket" search on all social networks associated with an email address (therefore also YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.). We enter the address on Pipl:
4. Verify an email address from the IP (advanced method)
An IP address uniquely identifies us on the internet (see how to know IP address) and, if we know where to look, it allows us to know the geographical location of the sender.
To find the address IP del server mail of the sender, for example with Gmail, click on "Show original" in the menu on the right to get all the detailed information for an email received on our account. We look for the line "Received: from" and locate the sender's address:
We copy the IP and go to a site to verify the sender's location. For example iplocation.net. We enter the IP address and verify its geographical location.
If it comes out as a geographic location "Hong Kong" or any other place in the world while our sender professed to be your language, we can be confident that it is an e-mail of spam, scam o Phishing and that the email address (even if it exists) is in no way reliable.
5. Verify an email address from the command line (advanced method)
We now come to the most advanced method for geeks or curious.
Without going into too much detail, when sentheng an email, the email client 1) searches for the recipient's email server 2) searches for the specific mailbox by querying the server found.
In reality, this is exactly what the services listed in the previous paragraphs do. Now we will go and do it ourselves Manually, with the tools made available to our operating systems.
Open Command Prompt on Windows or Terminal on Mac / Linux. From the email address, we get the domain name, which is the part after the @. We write (in the case of gmail.com):
nslookup -type = mx gmail.com
The answer goes like this:
gmail.com mail exchanger = 20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. gmail.com mail exchanger = 10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. gmail.com mail exchanger = 5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. gmail.com mail exchanger = 30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. gmail.com mail exchanger = 40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
In the example considered, gmail.com uses numerous email servers (we are always talking about Google). We take any mail server address from that list and open a connection with telnet on port 25:
telnet gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 25
The server is waiting for commands from us; we write:
HELO gmail.com
Let's identify ourselves with any email:
mail from:
This is the time to check the recipient's address. We write the string shown below, followed by the email address to be verified:
rcpt to:
The response from the server will be a very clear inthecation and will tell us if the recipient's email exists or not. In the case of a non-existent email:
550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist
We write "quit" to thesconnect from the e-mail server.
If you have read the whole article, you have the tools at your thesposal to do the necessary research and understand if an e-mail address exists or is not. Have a good search!
5 methods to understand if an email really exists
