Why Most Email Finding & Verification Tools Give you a High Bounce Rate

There are many solutions that promise to help you find email addresses from company websites or LinkedIn profiles. You probably use some of them already.

Here is why most of the emails they find for you end up bouncing:

1. There is only one way to validate an address with a low bounce risk. You need to give the address a specific set of tests. And most of the existing solutions do not pass all these tests, which explains the high bounce rate.
2. They have a business interest in providing you with uncertain addresses.

Verifying an email address

An email address can be verified by using this set of tests:

• Verify the format of the email address.
• Ensure the address doesn’t look like a random email address.
• Get the domain of the email.
• Grab the DNS MX records for that domain.
• Create a TCP connection to the SMTP server.
• Communicate with SMTP server.
• Detect catch-all address settings.

And the last test is key.

Detect catch-all address settings, is a test that looks for a specific setting called “catch-all”. This setting refers to a mailbox on a domain (@company.com) that will “catch all” of the emails addressed to the domain even if they do not exist in the mail server.

Therefore, if a mailbox is set up with a catch-all setting there is no way they can verify if the email address exists. The only thing they can do is make an educated guess.

Most of the existing solutions do not validate the address with this last test, which explains the high bounce rate of the emails they provide.

Why they don’t care if your email bounces

Most of these solutions have a credit business model. You only pay for the emails they are able to find — sounds fair right ? So, the faster you use the credits you bought the faster you will purchase another set of credits.

The thing is, for most of these providers email verification is their only source of revenue. Therefore, their business performance as a whole depends on customers spending their credits.

This is why they have to loosen the requirements for verifying an email address. For them its better to propose an email address (even though it is highly uncertain), than propose nothing.

You should always run an SMTP check test on the proposed email (test #6 from list). Once it’s done you can run the list for free on NeverBounce. It’s the only way to ensure a low-bounce.