Yeah this is not great practice.

We built an app where sending a validation email upfront was not a practical option some time ago, and the best strategy I found for ensuring the email was valid was to lookup the MX records and ask the mailserver for the given domain, by issuing RCPT commands. Many mailservers will just drop connections when RCPT is for someone who doesn't exist or can't be routed to which was a good indicator of a typo or invalid address. And of course if the MX lookup fails the domain is incorrect.

Still wouldn't recommend this method either though really.