Email validation

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.  This is called an MX Check. RampedUp doesn't validate personal email addresses so we just label them Personal.  We also look for Role Based emails meaning that there isn't a person associated the address - just a general mailbox. 

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.  If the process takes too long - then we return a status of Unknown. 

Most companies have Catch All domains for security or customer service reasons - but that isn't very helpful for validation.  That is why we created the Email Exhaust Exchange - a program where our partners share the results of their efforts with our email addresses. Here are a few of the different types of exhaust we use 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.
• Website Scrapping: This is a mixture of our own efforts and our partners. If we see a Catch All email address on a website - we promote that email to 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. Our partners provide the authentication results that we then use to provide a Valid / Invalid status. 

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. These are the email validation status results we provide on our professional email addresses:

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. 

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.