How We Verify Emails at BetterContact
Quick peek:
- All our emails go through our 4-layer verification process.
- You don’t need to manually verify emails we provide.
- Even “catch-all” emails (often calle ‘risky’) are verified, and we do our best to determine which ones are most likely good or not.
Here’s How It Works
We make sure every email address is checked. To do this, we use our 4-layer verification system, which includes a reliable catch-all verifcier. This helps us group emails into three categories:
1. Deliverable Emails
These are solid and reliable, with about a 1.4% chance they’ll bounce.
2. Undeliverable Emails
If an email is not good, we keep working to find a valid one, so you don’t waste your credits on bad emails.
3. Catch-all Emails
These are emails where one can't be 100% sure if they’re valid or not. However, through our catch-all verifier, we are able to determine whether this catch-all is actually valid or not:
- catch-all-safe: we received a digital handshake from the catch-all server and a positive response.
- catch-all-not-safe: there is no activity, and it can be concluded that the catch-all does not actually belong to the person.
While our catch-all verification system is best-in-class, a 'safe catch-all' status email typically has a higer bounce rate as compared to a ‘deliverable’ status email.
Traditional Email Verification Steps
Email verification is just a way to see if an email can receive messages. Here’s a simple breakdown of how it works:
Format Check – Does the email look right? For example, "nathan@bettercontact" isn’t correct, but "nathan@bettercontact.com" is.
Domain Check – Is the domain (the part after the @) real and active?
Mail Server Check – We check if the email server is ready to receive messages.
Ping Test – We send a “ping” (a small signal, not an actual email) to see if the specific email is working.
Catch-all Test – If the ping test says “yes,” we dig deeper to make sure the server isn’t set up to always say yes (this is what happens with catch-all emails). We send a few extra pings to random emails at the same domain to confirm.
Why Use More Than One Verifier?
We’ve tested different email verification tools, and we noticed something interesting: even when a tool says an email is “valid,” it sometimes still bounces (about 12.5% of the time!). This often happens because the tool didn’t catch that the email was a “catch-all.”
To avoid this, we use multiple verification tools. This way, we’re more confident when identifying if an email is catch-all or truly valid.
How We Handle Catch-all Emails
When we verify catch-all emails, we do two things:
- We check if the email is used online in real time.
- We look for accounts linked to that email on popular sites (like Google, Spotify, etc.).
Here’s how we do it: Our system tries logging into hundreds of sites using the email and a fake password. If the site says “wrong password,” it means the email is connected to an account. If it says “no user with this email,” it means the email probably isn’t used there.
This method isn’t perfect, though. Even if we find an account, the email might no longer be active. But it gives us a good idea.
Why Did My Workflow Stop Early?
Sometimes, we run into issues at the domain level (like anti-spam settings or other email delivery problems). When this happens, we’ve found the bounce rate is very high—up to 97.8%! To save you time and effort, we stop the process right there since it’s unlikely we’ll find a good email.
