It's good practice to regularly verify and clean the email accounts on your contact list to ensure that your email sender score remains healthy and bounce-free.
What is Email Verification?
If you verify an email address, you actively determine whether or not a contact's email account is active and receiving your emails. Email verification also ensures you are capturing and/or sending emails to email contacts that are valid and will not result in a bounce.
Some of the most common benefits of email verification are as follows:
Increase inbox delivery and avoid spam boxes
Adhere to bounce rate policies set forth by all major Email Service Providers (keep from getting banned)
Maintain/achieve a higher sender reputation
Maintain IP address health for continued email campaign success
Regulatory cleaning of company data
Your emails actually reach your customers
What is Email Cleaning?
Email cleaning involves removing incorrect or unverified email addresses from your CCK account and contact list.
To know which email accounts should be removed, we recommend that you upload your email list to an email cleaning and verification tool. This email cleaning and verification tool will check all of the emails on your contact list and confirm if an email account is active, correct and receiving emails from you.
Steps To Clean and Verify Your Email List
1. Register for a free account with NeverBounce.com to clean and verify your email list.
2. Open your CCK contact database and export your contact list. Make sure you export all of your contacts as shown below:
Open your emails to download your email list file:
3. Open your NeverBounce dashboard and click on Clean. Next, select Add List.
4. Drag your exported CCK contact list directly to the space shown below:
5. After your list has been uploaded, you will see the option to Analyze Your List or Clean Your List. Select the Clean My List option.
6. To clean your email list, you will be provided with a low pay-as-you-go quote. Add your card details and purchase the pay-as-you-go credits.
7. After your list has been cleaned and verified, you will see a results screen as shown below. This shows you a list of Valid, Invalid, Disposable and Unknown email accounts. Click the Download button to download your results.
8. Open the contact file and scroll to the final column to view the NeverBounce email_status column codes as shown below:
9. You can view a list of all NeverBounce email result codes here. We recommend the following actions based on the various result codes:
Valid
A valid email address has been verified as a real email that is currently accepting mail.
SAFE – These emails exist and have been verified for safe sending.
Invalid
An invalid email address has been verified as a bad recipient address that does not exist or is not accepting mail. Invalid emails will result in a bounce.
DON’T SEND – These emails do not exist and are not safe for sending. Delete this email from your CCK contact account.
Disposable
Disposable emails are temporary accounts used to avoid using a real personal account during a sign-up process. Common providers of disposable emails include Mailinator, Guerilla Mail, AirMail, and 10 Minute Mail.
DON’T SEND – These emails are fake or temporary emails and are not safe for sending. Delete this email from your CCK contact account.
Accept All (Unverifiable)
This is also known as a “catch-all”. This is a domain-wide setting where all emails on this domain will be reported as an "accept all". There is no definitive way to determine whether this email is valid or invalid.
An accept-all address is commonly used in small businesses to ensure a company receives any email that has been sent to them, regardless of typos.
Additionally, these are also found in larger government, medical and educational organizations. Oftentimes these are in fact valid emails. However, some organizations may utilize this setting as a security feature to prevent unsolicited emails.
DON’T SEND – Delete this email from your CCK contact account.
Unknown
We are unable to definitively determine this email’s status. This email appears to be OK, however, the domain and/or server is not responding to our requests. This may be due to an issue with their internal network or expired domain names. Unknown addresses are checked up to 75 times before this result code is given.
DON’T SEND – Delete this email from your CCK contact account.