Bulk Email Verification Status Explanations
When running a bulk email verification job from our bulk email verifier service you will get outstanding value and service, not to mention the extreme time savings to you and your business that makes your email marketing easier and faster. When you get back your results, you will see three different types of categories that your results are in, Good, Bad, and Unknown. Diving deeper into the meaning of each is the subject of today's article.
Good Status
The status of "Good" is very self-explanatory and does not need much review. When an email address results in Good, this means our system has found the email to be valid, live, and acceptable for continued used on your lists. The probability that this email address is legit is 99% and up.
Bad Status
Another term that does not need an in-depth explanation is the status of "Bad" and refers to any email address our system deems as unacceptable, invalid, or no longer active. With our deep mailbox ping capabilities, the probability that a bad status email address is not legit is very high and should be removed from your email marketing lists due to its volatility or invalid reply pings. This will help reduce your bounce rates and spam trap rates also.
Unknown Status
The "Unknown" status is the one that needs further explanation when an email address you receive back from us is classified in this category. The Unknown status affects around 10% to 15% of the average lists out there. The higher the rate of "free email" services from Yahoo, Hotmail, and smaller custom domain providers will result in a return of larger number of Unknown status emails. These type of emails should be carefully handled and should be considered as a maybe. They could be good or they could be bad. What happens is the email server that we test against and that hosts the email address being tested is being unreliable in their reporting back. This could be due to the age of the technology used or by firewall blocks to prevent mailbox checks used by the hosted email service.
Both older Yahoo and Hotmail servers are known for this, but it also depends the server itself. Some of these servers from both providers and/or smaller custom email hosting outfits use older technology that prevent our newer systems from combing them accurately. Email verification is a constant moving target in these cases and why we scan every single email address with multiple passes to minimize how many of these unknown statuses are returned. This will continue to grow smaller in time as email hosting providers upgrade their infrastructure to more modern options.
