Our Email Validation Process
When a customer downloads email addresses from our system, we pass them through our proprietary validation process. First, we observe if the email address is formatted correctly, if it is associated with a person or a role, if the domain is personal or professional, and if the domain accepts emails.
Our last check is to see if the email domain is Catch All because the results will all be the same. A Catch All mail server is configured to accept all emails sent to the domain, regardless of whether or not the specified recipient email address is valid. If the mail server is not Catch All, then then our servers negotiate with recipient's email server in a process called SMTP negotiation to produce a Valid / Invalid result.
Most companies have Catch All domains for security or customer service reasons - but that isn't very helpful for validation. That is why we added an few extra steps to validate / invalidate Catch All email addresses:
- Email Delivery: We receive the delivery status of millions of email addresses used in marketing campaigns. The opens and clicks are promoted to Valid. Hard bounces are demoted to the Invalid status.
- Web Source Emails: RampedUp scans hundreds of millions of corporate web pages each month for business intelligence. When we find an email address from a Catch All Server, we give it the Deterministic status and provide the link where we scanned it.
- Authentication: Microsoft and Google provide the ability to authenticate users for their Office and Workspace products. We search their Active Directory to associate a Valid or Invalid signal.
This is the final step of the process before we provide our validation results. It is a lot of work; we put 300 Million addresses through the process every quarter.
Email validation statuses
Valid – These have been confirmed as safe to send from the recipient or we have signals from our exhaust exchange that show us the email is deliverable.
Invalid – These have been confirmed as bad from the recipient mail server or has 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.
Unknown – These are email addresses where the recipient’s server did not give us a status for SMTP negotiation.
Grey Listed - High Security email servers that do 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.
