Email verification

Verification checks whether an address is likely to accept mail, before you send to it. It is built in, so there is no separate service to connect. When you finish this page you will know what the three results mean, what to do with each, and how many verifications your plan includes.

When to verify#

Verify before the first send to any list you have not mailed recently. Specifically:

• Any list you have imported from a file, a CRM, or another platform.
• Any list that has not been mailed in three months or more.
• Any list you did not build yourself, or that arrived from somebody who cannot tell you where the addresses came from.
• Any list where you can see obvious signs of trouble: role addresses, misspelled domains, rows that look machine generated.

The reason to verify before rather than after is that the first send is the one that costs you. Hard bounces are counted against your reputation as they happen. Cleaning a list after a bad send removes the addresses but not the damage.

Lists you mail regularly, built from your own forms, do not need verification before every campaign. They are already being cleaned continuously, because hard bounces are suppressed automatically as they occur.

The three results#

Verification returns one of three statuses for each address.

Deliverable. The address exists and the receiving server accepts mail for it. Send to these.

Undeliverable. The address does not exist, the domain does not exist, or the server refused it outright. These are the addresses that would hard bounce. Remove them from the list before you send. There is no benefit in keeping one to try later.

Risky. The check could not reach a definite answer. Several different situations produce this result, and they are not equally bad:

• A catch-all domain, where the server accepts mail for every address whether or not the mailbox exists. Common at small businesses. Many of these addresses are real.
• A role address such as info@, sales@ or support@. These are read by several people or by nobody, and they complain more often than personal addresses.
• A disposable or temporary mailbox, which was created to get past a signup form and is unlikely to be read.
• A mailbox showing signs of being full or inactive.

What to do with risky addresses depends on where you are. If your domain is new or your reputation is already under strain, exclude them from the send. If you have an established sending history and the addresses came from your own signup forms, you can include the catch-all and role addresses and watch the bounce rate on that send. Disposable addresses are worth removing in every case.

Verify a list#

Open Email verification and run a check against the list or the addresses you want tested. Verification takes time proportional to how many addresses you submitted, because each one involves a lookup against a remote server. A large import is not instant. Start it before you need the result rather than on the morning of a send.

When it finishes, act on the results in this order:

1. Remove every undeliverable address.
2. Decide on the risky addresses using the guidance above, and remove or exclude the ones you are not confident in.
3. Send to what is left, starting with the most engaged portion if the list is large or old.

How verification credits work#

Each plan includes a monthly verification allowance.

One address checked uses one verification, whatever result comes back. Undeliverable and risky results count the same as deliverable ones.

The monthly allowance resets at the start of each billing cycle. Unused allowance does not carry forward, so an unused 25,000 this month does not make next month 50,000.

If a one-time import is larger than your monthly allowance, buy an add-on verification pack. Packs come in 5,000, 25,000 and 100,000 verifications. Pack credits behave differently from the plan allowance: unused pack credits carry over to the next billing cycle rather than expiring. That makes a pack the right tool for an occasional large import, and the plan allowance the right tool for routine checking.

The details of how the two pools are drawn down are in Sending and verification credits, and the full allowance table is in Plans and limits.

What verification does not do#

Verification answers one question: will this address accept mail. It says nothing about whether the person behind it agreed to hear from you.

A purchased list that verifies at 98 percent deliverable is still a purchased list. The addresses work, which means the messages arrive, which means real people see mail they never asked for and press the spam button. Complaints damage a sending domain far faster than bounces do, and a clean bounce rate does not offset them.

So verification is a bounce control, not a permission control. Use it to protect yourself from addresses that have gone bad. Do not use it to persuade yourself that a list you should not mail is safe to mail.