How To Verify If An E-mail Address Exists

Sometimes you may want to make sure that an e-mail address exists before you start sending out messages to that address. While you could simply send a test message to the address and see if it bounces off the mail server, you’d may want to try a sneakier solution so that the recipient does not know about it. It should be clear that the recipient will receive the test message if the e-mail address exist.

Before we look at a tool that allows you to verify e-mail addresses, we should for a moment look at reasons for verifying addresses. A common reason is a mailing list that you want to clean up, another if you can only remember part of the e-mail address and not all of it.

EToolz is a free portable program for the Windows operating system that can verify if e-mail addresses exist. While it does not work for all messages, it works fine for many including Google E-Mail addresses (Gmail that is), and not for others like Microsoft’s Hotmail.

Switch to the Mail-Check tab of the program once you have started it. Here you need to key in the e-mail address you want to test, and optionally sender and server information as well as a timeout for the connection.



Click the start button once you have entered and modified all parameters to your liking. The program will then try to establish a connection with the selected e-mail address which may or may not work. Gmail will for instance let you know if sender and recipient are accepted. Even better, you will sometimes get information why it is not accepted, for instance if the email account is over quota like in the example on the screenshot above.

Not being able to test multiple e-mail addresses at once is one of the downsides of the program. You can download it from the developer website. Please note that the initial interface language is set to German. Click on Extras > Sprache / Language to change it to English or another of the supported languages.