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
Select the "Verifier" tool in the left-side navigation panel:
Enter the email address you'd like to verify
Click the "Verify" button to run the Email Verifier
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.
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.
You can find more detailed information on all of 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.
The confidence score
Along with the verification status, Hunter provides a confidence score for each email address.
The confidence score indicates how likely an email address is to be valid. Hunter continuously updates confidence scores based on the quality and quantity of public data points associated with each email address.
It is especially useful for accept-all domains, where individual email addresses can’t be fully verified. However, the score is only an indication, not a guarantee, and these emails may still bounce.
You’ll find the confidence score directly 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 email addresses with a confidence score of 90–95% or higher are generally more likely to be deliverable. However, even a high confidence score does not guarantee delivery. To reduce the risk of bounces, consider filtering out addresses with a confidence score below 85%.
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, most 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.
👉 Instead, all emails found in the Email Finder and Bulk Email Finder are already verified at no additional cost. These emails are valid and safe to use.
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. More on automatic verification of your leads can be found here
Looking to verify email addresses in bulk with Hunter? Check out our guide here.
For any questions refer to our FAQ section or contact the support team at contact@hunter.io.