What is Email Verification and Email Validation

There are two methods used to verify email addresses: Email Validation and Email Verification.

Email Validation checks the format of an email address to make sure it is valid, while Email Verification confirms that the email address exists and is associated with a working mailbox.

Email Validation is the process of making sure an email address has a valid format. This includes checking the characters used in the email address and the domain name. Email addresses can be checked for validity using a simple Regular Expression (RegEx) formula.

Email Verification goes one step further than Email Validation by actually sending a message to the mailbox associated with the email address. The email address is valid if the message is successfully delivered. Email verification can be done using SMTP, Ping, or MX Record Lookup.

So, which method should you use to verify your email addresses?

Both! Email validation will catch most invalid addresses, while email verification will confirm that the remaining addresses are valid or available to receive your emails.

What is Email Verification?

Email Verification a process of identifying spam, junk and/or invalid emails from your email list without sending emails to them. Using this process, most of the businesses clean their email list before sending marketing emails. Even measured in fractions of pennies, sending mail to dead addresses is a process that only gets worse over time.

What is Email Validation?

Email Validation is a swift process of identifying invalid email addresses by identifying typos and syntax errors from every email address in your list. Usually, it is like syntax checking of your emails and removing them from your list.

Now regarding your following question ...

If I have to verify or validate my email database

You need to first validate your email addresses (remove invalid emails) and later verify your email list before sending them marketing emails.

Note: most of email verification services will validate email addresses before processing email verification operations on them.