How to Use Ping to Verify an Email Address
So how can you check if the email lists on your database is valid or invalid? One way to verify an email address is by sending out a mail to those email lists, if the message did not bounce back, then it is safe to presume that the address is a valid one. However, there are web domains wherein they have designed a catch-all email address; this means that any email messages addressed to a not existing email address will never be delivered back to the sender. Nevertheless in most all cases, such email messages will certainly bounce back.
Another way to verify an email address is by pinging. This works when you send out email to a specific person, the message your message proceeds to an SMTP server which will then search for the MX (Mail Exchange) information of the email recipient’s domain. If for example, you send an email message to hello@gmail.com, the mail server will attempt to locate the MX records for the gmail.com domain. If the information is found and exists, the following step would be to evaluate if that email username ("hello" in the example) exists or not.
You may also verify an email address without sending a message. Here are the steps: