Our Email Intelligence process begins through SMTP Negotiation, which results in a VALID or INVALID response by communicating with the recipient's email server. This is the traditional ping that has been around for 25 years. However, most email addresses cannot be validated through SMTP Negotiation because business emails that are Catch All don't provide a credible response. So we created a process to validate Catch All Emails in other ways:
- Email Delivery: We receive the delivery status of tens millions of email addresses used in marketing campaigns. We provide the IP Address of the the opens and clicks then promote them to Valid. Hard bounces are assigned an Invalid status.
- Web Source Emails: RampedUp scans tens of millions of corporate web pages each month for business intelligence. When we find an email address and the address is Catch All, we assign the Deterministic status and provide the source. The Web Source is a great place to find additional details about the contact.
- Authentication: Microsoft and Google provide the ability to authenticate users for their Office and Workspace products. Authentication makes an API call to their Active Directory to identify Valid email addresses.
We blend these results with our SMTP negotiation responses in a cached repository of over 2.8 Billion signals. We add 5 million signals a day to keep it current and fresh. It has to be, this is what we use to validate our own database of 175 million email addresses.
Our Email Intelligence tool takes this cache to apply a Validation Status and Date by matching the email addresses. If we can't match the email address, we examine it's syntax to provide insight on the vast majority of any email list. These are the statuses provided:
- Valid – These have been confirmed as safe to send from the recipient's mail server or we have signals from our exhaust partners that show us the email is deliverable.
- Invalid – These have been confirmed as unsafe to send from the recipient's mail server or we have seen the email bounced from our email exhaust partners.
- Catch All – A catch all email server is configured to accept all emails sent to the domain, regardless of whether the specified recipient email address is valid. There is no validation date associated with these records
- Unknown – These are email addresses that can be verified where the recipient’s mail server did not give us a status for SMTP negotiation. These are risky emails.
- Grey Listed - This status denotes a High Security email server that does not return a validation status.
- Personal - The email domain isn't associated with a company but is used for personal reasons. Popular personal domains are G-Mail and Yahoo.
- Role Based - These are professional email addresses, but not associated with a specific person. An example would be Sales or Contact before the email domain.
- Deterministic - This is a CATCH ALL email address that we have seen on a public website.
Lastly, we provide additional details to better understand the email address and how we derived the status.
- The IP Address to indicate the location or device of where the email was opened.
- A Website or web page to identify a public source of the email address
- An inferred First Name, Last Name, and Naming Pattern taken from the user portion of the email address.
As an additional service, we will validate emails not found in our cached data and reprocess email addresses with older validation dates.
It's a lot of data and easy to use. Sign up here to try it out and select Email Intelligence.