This year has brought a lot of change in our industry and our company. We have introduced new technologies and hired industry veterans that have improved the quality of our data products. We have shortened our build cycles from 3 months to 1 month and now we are rolling out daily builds for contacts that have changed jobs. The build cycle for our alerts data is down to once an hour!
Over the course of the year, from the number of contacts we managed grew by 33,977,677 records but our professional email addresses decreased by 23,856,546 and that's a good thing. We introduced email authentication this Summer, a process of calling the Microsoft or Google API with a Catch All email address for sign-in instead of the mail server and the results have been outstanding!
Before the authentication process, we had over 200 million professional email addresses with the majority being Catch All. As of this month, our global flat file has 172,679,383 professional email addresses. It was alarming to see the drop but if you consider that Catch All emails have never been marked INVALID and now, we can verify (some of) them, losing 15% is on par with emails that can be verified through SMTP. Not only are we pushing out invalid emails, but we have also added 19,562,853 valid emails over the course of 2024.
We were also able to add 10,611,878 mobile phones to our contact database bringing our total to 57,776,253. This comes with a very rigorous hygiene process we added in the Spring:
- We removed duplicate numbers and ensured all mobile phones would have the same E164 format as the contact’s country of residence.
- All formats comply with country / area / exchange relationships and for countries that have dedicated area codes for mobile phones, we provide the regional carrier.
Many of these new phone numbers came from the 37,520,124 company websites we scan on a monthly basis. Domain scanning is a vital part of our data diversification strategy that helps us keep the company’s leadership and staff updated.
As for 2025, we plan on expanding our data diversification strategy to include more websites and more pages within them. We also plan on expanding our AI analysis to bring back more details on contacts, companies, and technologies. We are committed to providing fields that are high value, such as employer, title, direct phone number and email addresses, but also the frequency we update the fields. Customers using our app can already see the contacts we identified that have recently changed jobs, but we will be adding this feature to our API as well. Check out the API docs here.
Lastly, this year we introduced Email Open IP Scores to help those looking for IP to Domain resolution. By analyzing hundreds of millions of successful email opens from our Email Exhaust Exchange, we assign IP addresses to corporate domains. Email Open IP Score shows the known IP Addresses from email opens in an array and a confidence score. This is a large piece of our Identity Resolution products.