Many different  fake email verifier services exist, but most follow similar types of processes to confirm that an email address is valid. Whether it’s pinging the address, checking the MX records, or looking for syntax errors, these tools help make sure your emails get to their intended recipients—and don’t end up in spam folders and blocked entirely.

The first step in any good email validation process is a ping, which sends a request to an email address to see how it responds. This step helps to ensure that the email address is active and can receive messages from marketers, allowing you to use it for your campaigns.

Don’t Get Scammed: A Guide to Checking If an Email is Genuine

Next, an email verifier checks to make sure that the domain is registered and active and that it can receive emails. This step is important to avoid using fake email addresses, which can hurt your reputation and lead to high spam complaints. It also helps you avoid using catch-all addresses, which are real-looking but invalid and used by email providers and anti-spam groups to catch malicious senders.

A final check that most email verification tools perform is to look for substitution and transposition, where an attacker swaps out or replaces characters in an email address to make it appear fake. For example, it’s common to find an “m” replaced with an “rn”, or a lower case “L” switched out for the number “1”.

Aside from helping to improve the quality of your marketing emails, the ability to verify email addresses saves businesses time and money. They’re able to focus on sending their messages to the right audience—and that can lead to better engagement and increased ROI.