How to Check the Age of an Email Address?

Checking the age of an email address can be useful for various reasons, such as verifying the authenticity of the sender, identifying potential spam, or determining how long a particular account has been active. While there isn’t a direct way to check the exact creation date of an email account for most email providers, several methods and tools can help you estimate its age. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to check the age of an email address:

1. Check the “Welcome Email” in Your Inbox

If you’re checking the age of an email account that you own, the simplest method is to look for the very first email you received after creating the account. Most email providers send a “Welcome” or “Account Activation” email immediately after you create your account. The date of this email will give you an idea of when the email address was created.

• Step-by-step:
  • Open your email inbox.
  • Use the search function and enter keywords like “Welcome” or the name of your email provider (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, etc.).
  • Sort the emails by date and look for the oldest message, which should be the welcome email.

This method is accurate for personal email accounts but won’t work if you’re trying to check the age of someone else’s email address.

2. Use Email Age Checker Tools

There are online tools specifically designed to help you estimate the age of an email address. These tools don’t tell you the exact date the email was created, but they give an estimate based on the first time the email address appeared on their networks or in their databases.

Some of the most popular tools include:

• EmailHippo
  EmailHippo’s email verification services include an “email age” feature that tells you when the email was first detected on the internet. It’s easy to use and requires only the email address you want to check.
• IPQualityScore
  IPQualityScore offers a free email age checker. This tool provides an estimated age of the email and includes additional information such as whether the email is considered high risk or suspicious.
• Hunter.io
  Hunter.io is another powerful tool that includes domain verification and email age checking. It’s primarily aimed at marketers, but it can be used to estimate the age of any email address.

How to use these tools:

1. Go to the website of the email age checker tool (e.g., EmailHippo, IPQualityScore, or Hunter.io).
2. Enter the email address you want to check in the search box.
3. Click on the search or verify button.
4. Wait for the results, which will give you an estimated age for the email address.

3. Use Domain WHOIS Lookup for Custom Domains

If the email address you’re trying to check uses a custom domain (e.g., name@company.com), you can check the domain registration date to estimate how old the email address might be. A WHOIS lookup tool provides information about when the domain was first registered, which can help you get an idea of the potential age of the email address.

• Step-by-step:
  • Go to a WHOIS lookup tool like whois.domaintools.com or ICANN WHOIS.
  • Enter the domain (e.g., company.com) associated with the email address.
  • Check the domain creation date, which will give you the earliest possible date that the email address could have been created.

Keep in mind that the email address could have been created any time after the domain was registered, but this at least provides a starting point for the age estimate.

Conclusion

While there is no single foolproof method to determine the exact creation date of an email address (especially if it belongs to someone else), these methods and tools can help you estimate the age of an email account. Whether you’re using an email age checker tool, examining email headers, or doing a WHOIS lookup for custom domains, these strategies can provide useful insights into the credibility and age of the email address you’re investigating.