Main and Additional Statuses Details Explained

After verification, each email address gets assigned a main status and, in some cases, an additional status, which, as a rule, reflects the key characteristics of this address. Based on verification results, we provide recommendations for working with a particular email.

Let's take a look at what various statuses mean and how they can help you manage your lists.

General statuses

Deliverable - A valid, working, deliverable address. You can send emails to it.

Risky - This type of address may be valid, but may potentially cause other significant problems for the sender. More on this below.

Undeliverable - undeliverable address, invalid address, which is not good to have on a list. We recommend excluding this email address from future mailings.

Unknown - If you try validating the address again, you will usually get a status, but most of the time the address is invalid. Addresses with the Unknown status, in most cases, have a bad reputation.

Additional statuses of Risky email addresses:

1. CatchAll

This is a universal email address that accepts all messages addressed to an incorrect email address. For example, there are 2 email addresses on the server: info@site.com and manager@site.com. All@site.com is used as a universal CatchAll address. Any messages sent to the auxiliary address admin@site.com will go to all@site.com.

What could be the reason for this?

– Validation failed due to a timeout while verifying the rejection of a fake email address by the mail server.

– Failed to validate, a connection error occurred while verifying the catch-all settings on the external mail server.

– The external mail exchanger accepts fake and nonexistent email addresses. Therefore, the provided email address may not exist, and the existence of the individual mailbox cannot be verified.

Recommendations: We recommend excluding this email address from future mailings, or you can try sending messages to some addresses with this status (CatchAll) and see how that goes. Just be sure to watch the bounce and spam rates carefully if you do that.

2. Disposable address

What could be the reason for this?

High-risk email type, the address is associated with a well-known disposable / throw-away email provider. A disposable email provider, often referred to as DEA provider, is a service that offers temporary and anonymous email addresses for short-term use.

3. Spam trap

What could be the reason for this?

The email address is a honeypot (also known as spamtrap). We strongly advise removing honeypots from your lists.

4. Mailbox problem

What could be the reason for this?

– The mailbox for the email address is either over its storage quota, or the mail exchanger has insufficient system storage.

Recommendations: We recommend excluding this email address from future mailings.

– Validation failed because the requested mailbox is temporarily unavailable. This doesn't necessarily mean the mailbox doesn't exist; it's often a response from mail exchangers with greylisting enabled.

– Validation failed due to a timeout while verifying the existence of the mailbox.

Recommendations: If you try validating the address again, you will usually get a status, but most of the time the address is invalid. Addresses with the Unknown status, in most cases, have a bad reputation.

5. MX problem

What could be the reason for this?

– High-risk email type: the email address is served by a parked or inactive mail exchanger, which may potentially resell collected email data.

Recommendations: We strongly recommend removing this address from your lists.

– Validation failed because the external mail exchanger rejected the local sender address.

– Validation failed because the external mail exchanger rejected the local endpoint.

– Validation failed because the external mail exchanger replied in a non-standard way.

– Validation failed because the requested mail exchanger is temporarily unavailable, possibly due to system maintenance or other transient conditions.

Recommendations: If you try validating the address again, you will usually get a status, but most of the time the address is invalid. Addresses with the Unknown status, in most cases, have a bad reputation.

Additional statuses of Undeliverable email addresses:

Invalid email format.

What could be the reason for this?

– Syntax errors in the address.

– An invalid sequence of two adjacent dots has been found.

Example:
john..smith@example.com

– The email address has an invalid total length.

Example:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx….

– An invalid character has been detected in the provided sequence.

Example:
oo"bar@example.com

– An invalid folding white space (FWS) sequence has been found. Folding white space (FWS) is a concept defined in the Internet email standards (RFC 5322) and refers to the use of white space (spaces, tabs, or line breaks) to format and structure certain parts of an email header, including the message body.

Example:
john \rsmith@example.com
(where \r is the LF symbol)

– The local part of the email address has an invalid length.

Example:
john. \rsmith@example.com
(where \r is the LF symbol)

– A new word boundary has been detected at an invalid position. These pertain to the syntax of email addresses, as outlined in the IETF standard, which govern how email addresses should be formatted.

Example:
\foo@example.com

– Following the syntactic rules of the target mail exchangers for the domain, the address is considered syntactically invalid.

– The number of parentheses used to open comments is not equal to the number used to close them. Comments in email addresses are a way to include additional information or annotations within an email address without affecting the functionality of the address.

Example:
john.)smith@example.com

– An invalid quoted word with no content has been found. Quoted words in email addresses refer to portions of the email address that are enclosed within double quotation marks ("): these quoted words are used to include special characters or spaces within an email address's local part (the part before the "@" symbol) that would otherwise not be allowed.

Example:
john."".smith@example.com

– An unexpected quoted pair sequence has been found within a quoted word. Quoted words in email addresses refer to portions of the email address that are enclosed within double quotation marks ("): these quoted words are used to include special characters or spaces within an email address's local part (the part before the "@" symbol) that would otherwise not be allowed. These pertain to the syntax of email addresses, as outlined in the IETF standard, which govern how email addresses should be formatted.

Example:
 "\␉"@xyz.xyz

– A quoted pair within a quoted word is not properly closed. Quoted words in email addresses refer to portions of the email address that are enclosed within double quotation marks ("): these quoted words are used to include special characters or spaces within an email address's local part (the part before the "@" symbol) that would otherwise not be allowed.

Example:
"\

– Invalid email address: the external mail exchanger does not support international mailbox names. To support this feature, mail exchangers must comply with RFC 5336 and announce support for both the 8BITMIME and UTF8SMTP protocol extensions.

Domain problem

What could be the reason for this?

– Domain does not exist.

– Domain lacks valid DNS records and cannot receive messages from external hosts on the Internet. The domain of email address points to a non-routable IP address

– Domain part of the email address does not comply with IETF standards.

– A socket connection error occurred while trying to connect to the mail exchanger that serves the email address domain. Trying a higher results quality level is likely to provide a definitive response: if the issue persists, it indicates that the domain associated with the email address is unable to accept email messages.

– A timeout occurred while trying to connect to the mail exchanger that serves the email address domain. Trying a higher results quality level is likely to provide a definitive response: if the issue persists, it indicates that the domain associated with the email address is unable to accept email messages.

– The domain literal of the email address cannot accept messages from the Internet. Domain literals are another feature found in the IETF standards: they enable the sending of messages directly to Internet hosts, rather than just domains.

– The domain intentionally does not have any mail servers configured to receive email messages.

– A socket connection error occurred while querying the DNS servers for records about the domain.

– A timeout occurred while querying the DNS servers for records about the domain.

Mailbox does not exist

The mailbox for the email address does not exist.

Why we set the status to "Unknown"

Validation failed due to unexpected technical issues during the processing of this email address.

Important note:

We recommend that you consider your specific needs when deciding what to do with any given email. For this purpose, we have added the ability to view emails that deliver results and have activity recorded, such as opens, clicks, revenue, as long as you have originally uploaded this data in the same file with the email addresses.

About Duplicates

By default, before starting address verification, you can choose to exclude duplicate email addresses. Those are addresses that are a full match. Only one copy will be left on the list.