Why should email addresses be verified?
Verifying email addresses is crucial for avoiding bounces that can damage your delivery rate.
While many email addresses in Hunter are pre-verified, you should always verify emails you don't know the status of before you reach out.
Using the Email Verifier for this check will confirm whether the email address exists and whether it can actively receive mail.
How to verify an email with the Email Verifier
To begin verifying emails with Hunter, select the Verifier tool within the left-hand navigation panel:
Enter an email address to verify
Within the Email Verifier, type or paste in the email address you'd like to verify, then click the "Verify" button once you're ready:
Review and interpret results
After the verification has been performed, you'll see an overview of your results:
The Email Verifier can provide you with four different results:
Valid email: This result means that the email address passed all verification checks and is valid and deliverable.
Accept all emails: Hunter, like any other verifier, cannot fully guarantee deliverability if the domain uses an accept-all policy. This policy allows all emails to be accepted, preventing us from confirming whether a specific mailbox is set up or if emails will bounce.
More on Accept all domains can be found here: What does an "Accept-all" email status mean?
Invalid email: This result means that the email did not pass one or more checks in the email verifier, and doesn’t exist.
Blocked email: The email server has blocked our verification process, so we cannot be sure if the email is valid or not. When an email has a blocked status, we do not charge any verification credits.
ℹ️ You can find more detailed information on all the possible verification statuses here.
How to read the confidence score and color codes
Each possible result in the Email Verifier will have a color code and an associated confidence score.
Here's a quick review of the color-codes we use, and what results they're correlated with:
Green: If an email address is color-coded green, that means the email address was verified as valid and is safe to send emails to.
Yellow: If an email address is color-coded yellow, that means the email address is from an Accept all domain, and we can't guarantee its deliverability.
Red: If an email address is color-coded red, that means the email address was verified as invalid and is not safe to send to.
Confidence score
Along with those possible statuses, Hunter will also provide a confidence score for the email addresses you verify.
The confidence score provides a first overview of the likelihood that the email is valid. You'll see the score right below the email address.
⚠️ We recommend using confidence scores only for accept-all emails, and relying on the email status for other types such as valid or invalid emails.
Accept-all emails with a confidence score of 90–95% or higher are likely to be deliverable, though a high score doesn’t fully guarantee delivery.
If you’re concerned about bounces, consider filtering out addresses with a confidence score below 85%.
Providing accurate and up-to-date confidence scores is our top priority — these scores are continuously refreshed based on the quality and number of public data points linked to each email.
ℹ️ You can find more information on how to use accept all emails in your outreach in our Accept-all emails guide.
Verify an email address within the Domain Search and Discover
When using Hunter’s Domain Search and Discover features, some email addresses may already come pre-verified as we constantly re-verify emails in our database.
If the email address you reveal is not pre-verified, you can choose to verify the email address on the spot: this will use 0.5 credits.
ℹ️ All emails found in the Email Finder and Bulk Email Finder are already verified: this means you won't need to re-verify them.
Verify an email address in Leads
When storing your data in Hunter Leads, you can verify email addresses in your Lead list with a single click.
If you're on a paid All in one outreach plan, once the lead has been verified, Hunter will re-verify your stored leads each month at no additional cost to ensure your saved data is up to date.
Looking to verify email addresses in bulk with Hunter? Check out our guide here.