Verify Emails From Business Cards and Badge Scans Before You Follow Up

Business-card and badge-scan emails need two steps before a follow-up: repair the reading slips, then check which addresses have a mailbox. The slips are predictable because every route from paper to a spreadsheet goes through OCR or a person typing, and both guess. The free scanned email address repair tool does the first step in your browser; the verify page does the second, with the first 100 checks free on a Google sign-in and no card.

Why these addresses go wrong

A card is printed in a small, stylised font. A badge scanner may give you a name and company, with the address typed by hand later. A photographed sign-in sheet is handwriting. Each route has its own slips:

Source	Typical slip	Example
OCR on a card	Digit for letter, merged letters	j0hn@ for john@, rn read as m
Typed from a card	Spoken form, stray spaces	jane dot smith at gmail dot com
Handwritten sheet	Domain slip, missing letter	sam@gmial.com, ana@yahooo.com
Exported with the note	Name and address in one cell	Raj Patel raj.patel@northwind.example
Copied from a phone	Wrapping characters	<tom@fabrikam.example>, mailto: prefix

None of these is a verification problem. They are reading problems, and they should be fixed before you spend a check on them.

Step 1: Put every address on its own row

Get the addresses into one column. If an export has the name and address in one cell, keep the part with the @. If a card gave two addresses, put each on its own row; the email extractor pulls addresses out of messy text when the cells are a mix.

Step 2: Repair the slips that rules can fix

Paste the column into the scanned email address repair tool. It turns spoken at and dot into @ and a full stop, strips spaces, brackets, quotes, mailto: and trailing punctuation, corrects domain slips such as gmial.com or a .con ending, and reads digits that look like letters when the domain becomes a well-known provider (h0tmail.com becomes hotmail.com).

Every row comes back with what was typed, what it became and what changed. Read the changes. A rule that is right nine times in ten still deserves a look on the tenth, and it is much quicker to look at the table than at the cards.

Step 3: Look at the rows marked Check by eye

The tool never rewrites the name before the @. A name such as j0hn may be a misread john, or it may be exactly what the person has. Only the card can say. Pull the cards for these rows, or drop them. A short list of well-checked contacts beats a long list with a few wrong people on it.

Rows the tool cannot repair, such as an address with no @ and no spoken at, go back to whoever collected them. Do not guess a domain.

Step 4: Check which repaired addresses exist

A repaired address is well formed. That does not mean anyone reads it. Upload the repaired list to the verify page. Each address comes back valid, risky or invalid with a reason, so you can see which rows are typos that survived repair (mailbox not found), which are on domains that take no mail, and which sit on domains that accept all addresses. Details of each result are in verification results explained.

Event lists are small, so the first 100 free checks may cover the whole file. For larger conference lists, event attendee list cleaning covers the wider process.

Step 5: Decide what to send, and to whom

• Valid: send the follow-up. Write it as a message to a person you met, with the event and what you talked about in the first line.
• Risky: many are company domains that accept all mail, so the address may be right and still unconfirmed. Send these in a small batch after the valid rows and watch the bounces. Catch-all emails: what to do has the rule.
• Invalid: do not send. Go back to the card. If the name looks right and the domain looks right, a different spelling of the address may be the real one; do not try permutations on a stranger's mailbox.

If you have a lot of event contacts, the free vs business email filter separates company addresses from Gmail and Outlook ones so you can write different follow-ups.

Prevent the slips next time

• Ask people to type their own address on a tablet rather than write it. The in-store and kiosk sign-up guide covers the form side.
• Photograph the card and keep the photo next to the row until the address has been checked.
• Do the repair and check within a day or two of the event, while people remember you.

What this does not do

Repair and verification do not tell you whether you may email someone, and they do not make a cold message welcome. They only remove the addresses that would bounce. Read how to verify an email list for the full send routine, and keep the first message short.

A worked example

Suppose you come back from a two-day event with 140 cards. Typed up, about a dozen rows hold a name and an address in one cell, a handful say "at" and "dot", and a few have an obvious domain slip. Run the column through the repair tool, then read only the rows that changed or were flagged. That is a few minutes of reading, not an hour of retyping. The remaining rows go to the check as they are. Anything invalid gets a second look against its card before you give up on the contact, because a card in your hand is a better source than a guess.

Check the list

Paste the repaired addresses on the verify page: 100 free checks, Google sign-in, no card. Then send to the valid rows first.