Email list checker for music outreach

What the email checker looks at

Each address goes through five checks. First the syntax: one @, a real domain ending, no spaces or typos like a double dot. Then we look the domain up in DNS and ask whether it has a mail server (an MX record). A domain with no mail server cannot receive email, so anything sent there bounces. We flag throwaway domains, the kind people use once to grab a download. We mark role inboxes like info@, hello@ or admin@. Last, we check whether the address is in the DemoPool base and, if it is, show the date it last passed our mail server check.

What we don't do on this page is knock on the mailbox itself. That step needs a mail server talking to their mail server, and doing it from a shared free tool would get us blocked fast. So "Good" means the address and its domain are fine, not that a person reads it.

Why bounces hurt your sender reputation

Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo judge you by how your mail behaves. A bounce tells them you are sending to people you don't know. A few are normal. A batch of them, sent in one morning to curators and labels, looks like a bought list. Your next emails start landing in spam, including the ones to people who would have answered. A cold pitch has one shot, and a burned sender domain takes weeks to recover.

Role inboxes are a softer problem. They rarely bounce, but they are shared, often filtered and read last. A pitch to info@ gets a lower reply rate than one to a named person, so use them when there is nothing better.

Gmail and Yahoo sender rules since 2024

Since February 1, 2024, Google requires everyone who sends to Gmail to set up SPF or DKIM for their domain and keep the spam rate in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. Senders of more than 5,000 messages a day also need SPF, DKIM and DMARC, plus one-click unsubscribe on marketing mail. The same guide says to aim for a spam rate under 0.1% and to automatically unsubscribe people whose messages bounce several times.

Yahoo started enforcing similar rules in February 2024: authenticate your mail, keep spam complaints below 0.3% and honor unsubscribes within 2 days. Its sender guide is blunt about list hygiene: "Remove invalid recipients from your list promptly."

Most artists pitching their own release are far below 5,000 emails a day. The signals still apply to you: authenticated domain, low complaints, few bounces.

How to clean an outreach list before a release

Run every new address through a checker before it goes into your sheet. Delete anything marked dead. Look twice at role inboxes and swap them for a named contact when you can find one. Send from your own domain with SPF and DKIM set up, ten to twenty personal emails a day, not two hundred in one go. Watch your bounces after the first day and remove every hard bounce at once. Then do it again before the next release, because inboxes go dead every month.

Sources: Google, Email sender guidelines (checked Oct 9, 2026) · Yahoo Sender Hub, Sender best practices (checked Oct 9, 2026).