Email address authenticity is more than just a best practice—it’s a necessity. After all, if you send emails to fake addresses, they’ll bounce or get marked as spam or blacklisted—and your deliverability will tank. The good news is, there are plenty of tools available that can make checking for valid addresses fast and easy, even at scale.

Some tools simply check email address authenticity errors (typos) and the existence of a mailbox by connecting to the mail server (over SMTP and also by simulating sending an email). Other methods can verify the domain, MX records and email account, looking for catch-alls, disposable or temporary addresses, and other indicators of a fake or compromised email. These techniques may require more technical knowledge, but are still very helpful for marketers who need to quickly verify large amounts of data.

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For more protection, email verification techniques can also check for DMARC and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) compliance, which helps ensure that the email is truly from the domain it claims to be from. This can be a good extra layer of security, though it doesn’t necessarily guarantee authenticity on a user-level, as scammers have learned to copy a bank’s logo or footer, for instance, and use the same greeting.

Adding additional layers of validation can provide more confidence, but it’s important to balance the level of scrutiny with the need for speed and accuracy at scale. Heavy validation processes can impede the workflows of busy marketers, and may hurt customer satisfaction as well.