Email Validation Statuses Explained

The Email Verification Module in the AI Toolkit provides users with a downloadable report to see the email statuses of all emails run through the validation tool.

Below, you'll find a list of the common status types you'll see after downloading and viewing the report.

For more details on Deliverability Status Codes including explanations of Sub Status codes, please visit the following link - ZeroBounce Email Validation Status Codes

Status Codes & their Explanations:

• valid - These are emails that we determined to be valid and safe to email to, they will have a very low bounce rate of under 2%. If you receive bounces it can be because your IP might be blacklisted where our IP was not. Sometimes the email accounts exist, but they are only accepting mail from people in their contact lists. Sometimes you will get throttle on number of emails you can send to a specific domain per hour. It's important to look at the SMTP Bounce codes to determine why.

• invalid - These are emails that we determined to be invalid, please delete them from your mailing list.

• catch-all - These emails are impossible to validate without sending a real email and waiting for a bounce. The term Catch-all means that the email server tells you that the email is valid, whether it's valid or invalid. If you want to email these addresses, I suggest you segment them into a catch-all group and know that some of these will most likely bounce.

• spamtrap- These emails are believed to be spamtraps and should not be mailed. We have technology in place to determine if certain emails should be classified as spamtrap. We don't know all the spamtrap email addresses, but we do know a lot of them. Read Zero Bounce's Guide to Spam Traps to learn more.

• abuse- These emails are of people who are known to click the abuse links in emails, hence abusers or complainers. We recommend not emailing these addresses.

• do_not_mail- These emails are of companies, role-based, or people you just want to avoid emailing to. They are broken down into 6 sub-categories "disposable","toxic", "role_based", "role_based_catch_all", "global_suppression" and "possible_trap". Examine this file and determine if you want to email these address. They are valid email addresses, but shouldn't be mailed in most cases.

• unknown- These emails we weren't able to validate for one reason or another. Typical cases are "Their mail server was down" or "the anti-spam system is blocking us". In most cases, 80% unknowns are invalid/bad email addresses. We have the lowest "unknowns" of any email validator, and we don't make this statement lightly. We paid and tested email lists at over 50 different validation companies to compare results. If you do encounter a large number of unknowns, please submit those for re-validation. Remember you are not charged for unknown results, credits will be credited back. If you still have a large number, contact us and we will take a look and verify.