In the realm of email marketing, leveraging email lists is a standard practice, with platforms like Neverbounce at the forefront for their vital role in validating and cleaning them. Alongside similar services such as Zerobounce and Apollo, Neverbounce is part of a trio of prominent platforms dedicated to enhancing the quality of email lists. Before deploying these lists in marketing campaigns, it’s crucial to ensure their integrity and cleanliness, as using unverified lists can jeopardize your sender reputation.
Merely dispatching emails to every address on a list without validation can lead to negative consequences. While platforms like Neverbounce strive to mitigate issues by filtering out problematic email addresses using advanced tools, including AI scoring, some addresses may still pose challenges. It’s essential, therefore, to validate emails obtained from such platforms to maintain the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
Upon obtaining an email list, it’s useful to understand the composition of the email addresses it contains. Before delving into specific categories like ‘accept-all’ emails, let’s clarify the types of email addresses you can expect to refine through a service like Neverbounce:
Types of Email Addresses Processed by Neverbounce:
Engaging with a service like Neverbounce for your email list means you’re looking to enhance a list that comprises various types of email addresses. The goal is to ensure that your list predominantly features:
Valid Email Addresses:
The paramount category you’ll want your list to be enriched with includes valid email addresses. These are addresses verified by Neverbounce as legitimate, active, and capable of receiving emails. This validation is critical, as it assures you that emails sent to these addresses are likely to be successfully delivered, assuming your sender reputation remains intact.
These are the best addresses to target when sending an email message. These addresses are accepting incoming emails, and it is unlikely that your emails will bounce. Generally, valid email addresses are the best email domains to have on any cold email marketing list.
Valid email addresses are safe to contact; you can send them an email, but it will not bounce. High bounce rates damage your sender’s reputation, leading to issues like being automatically flagged as spam or, worse, having your email service provider (ESP) ban your account(s). Valid emails are not a guarantee to open your email, of course, which can cause its own problems.
What it does let you know, though, is that you can send an email to that address, and it is not going to bounce due to the email being incorrect, invalid, or fake. Knowing that the email status of an address is valid makes it easier for an email marketer to send material to that address in confidence.
Invalid Email Addresses
The next option likely to appear on a list from Neverbounce is invalid email addresses. An invalid email address is the opposite of the above; Neverbounce has verified that this email is unsuitable for contact. It could be that the email address is not accepting any emails, so your message will bounce.
Or, it could be that the email address is invalid because it does not exist. This could be due to the email address being closed down, a typo in the email address, or other related issues. Either way, you cannot contact an invalid email address. You should avoid contacting them as it will bounce.
Bounce rates are a major factor in how likely your emails will be allowed to go through an inbox. If you have high bounce rates, you can be seen as spammy. Invalid emails should then be discarded.
The invalid rate of emails in an email list is important to determine before using that email list in an email campaign. Invalid emails will negatively impact your email deliverability rate. This can make your mail server treat your accounts as those likely to send spam emails.
Disposable Email Addresses
Another more confusing alternative is known as disposable email addresses. These email addresses are generally fake because people only use them to sign up for something. For example, someone might create a disposable email address to sign up for a discount program. This can be a useful security feature, so users can sign-up to things without using their main email address.
This means they can still sign up without using their real email address. Others use this as a ‘burner’ account to set up secondary profiles on social media. Various services like 10 Minute Mail offer these email addresses, where the emails are temporary.
After some time, these email addresses are deleted or become invalid. The mail server they are held on will be wiped, too. As such, emailing this account would almost certainly lead to reduced engagement rates.
This means that by sending an email to this address, you will almost certainly see the email bounce or be ignored. Therefore, they should be discarded when creating any email marketing campaigns. Messaging these emails could hurt your email deliverability, reducing your email account’s reputation and thus making it harder to land in other email inboxes.
Unknown Email Addresses
The other most common option you might run into when using Neverbounce is an unknown email address. These addresses have not been able to be verified on Neverbounce. These are often valid email addresses but are not responding to any requests.
This could be due to a whole range of issues. For example, the domain name behind the email address might no longer exist because it has not been renewed. Or it could be inaccessible due to an internal network issue on their end. You might consider contacting them if you use a private dedicated email server. Some of these emails could be spam traps, so it is important to be vigilant when contacting such email addresses.
However, if you are using an ESP that is not private, we recommend avoiding messaging unknown email addresses. This could harm you by leading to a needless increase in bounce rates.
These four email address types are the most common that you will find within a Neverbounce email marketing campaign list. However, there is another form of email that you should be looking out for.
Accept-all Email Addresses
Now we get to arguably the most frequently misunderstood email address types: accept-all email addresses. You might have heard of these emails before; if you have heard the term “catch-all email”, this is the same time. Accept-all email, or catch-all email addresses, are emails set up for a domain. They have a specific purpose: to capture emails that might have slipped the net.
For example, let us say that your business has two main emails that people contact: info@yourdomain and support@yourdomain. They are general email addresses anyone can contact for more information or customer support enquiries. However, what if someone makes a mistake when contacting these addresses? What if they type ‘suppport@yourdomain’ or ‘inffo@yourdomain’ instead?
Without an accept-all email address, this would bounce. The email would never be received, meaning the sender never gets the desired answer. This makes the company seem rude for not answering back and could cause reputational damage due to the person not receiving a support response. A catch-all address, then, can be great for ensuring your message is received.
However, this problem can be avoided by having a catch-all/accept-all email address.
A catch-all email account will catch any email sent to the domain that does not land in a specific inbox. The same goes for if you have staff accounts. Let’s say that you have a staff member who is your main sales liaison. Her name is Sarah, and she has the email address sarah@yourdomain. A supplier contacts her to arrange an order but accidentally types ‘sara@yourdomain’—that email is lost.
Or, it would be if the company does not have an accept-all email address. These addresses do as the name suggests: they accept all emails sent to your domain that do not land with a specific address. This allows companies to ‘catch-all’ emails, even those that might have slipped past. At the very least, knowing your email lands in email servers with accept-all domains can reduce bounce messages and keep your email score higher.
Who Uses Accept-All Email Addresses?
Many different groups of people use these address styles. Government organizations, academic groups, businesses, and even entrepreneurs might see the value in setting up an accept-all email address. Small businesses are especially common users now due to the ease of catching emails that would have otherwise slipped the net.
Many companies and groups will use an accept-all email address for various reasons. The main reason is to avoid customer and partner enquiries from falling through the cracks due to a typo. However, these are also regular email addresses, with their inbox filled with marketing materials aimed at that particular business.
If you have bought an email address list, it will likely have a few accept-all email addresses within. Email marketing campaigns rarely target these addresses because they are rarely checked. Some companies will set a policy to have their accept-all email addresses checked every X days; others simply have them checked once or twice per year.
So, it becomes easy for any email marketing material sent to accept-all email addresses and never be seen. This will at least avoid the email bouncing, but it does hamper your read rates. That can be just as important to your sender reputation, as a high volume of emails not being read implies you are contacting the wrong people.
Should You Send Marketing Emails To Accept-all Email Addresses?
There are two schools of thought on this. The simplest explanation is that if you have your own dedicated email server, complete with your own IP addresses, then you could send email to accept-all email addresses. If you are using a third-party email server, though, you should probably avoid contacting an accept-all email address.
Why? If the email does not bounce, then it will simply lie in that account, which is unlikely to be opened. That will make it easier for you to receive a negative open and read rate. Also, it means that this is another email account that fails to interact with your email address. That looks bad for most email marketing campaigns and could lead to your email platform being seen as spammy and untrustworthy.
What Are Accept-all Unverifiable Emails In Neverbounce?
Another confusing element when looking at your email list are unverifiable accept-all email addresses. Unfortunately, if a domain has settings that ensure all emails on this domain are seen as an accept-all (unverifiable) email address, then there is no way to verify their legitimacy. This means that you could be sending emails to accounts which are real, but are designed to be unverified.
Generally, when you receive an email list that has accept-all email addresses within it, you should review the information contained closely. For example, you might find that this domain has a large number of unverifiable emails. If there are a large number of invalid emails in your email list, though, it is likely that accept-all email addresses are more likely to bounce due to being invalid.
According to Neverbounce’s own help page, the general rule with their email lists is that for every invalid email you have, around half that percentage of your accept-all email addresses will also be invalid. So, as the example given shows, if 10% of the email list is invalid, 5% of the accept-all emails will also be invalid. This can make it easier to determine whether or not sending to these addresses is worth the risk.
How Does Neverbounce Validate Accept-all Email Addresses?
Neverbounce claims to offer an accuracy rating of around 93% on their email verification process. They use various tools, like their in-house Sync system, to automatically clean up email lists from platforms like Mailchimp. NeverBounce uses an in-house verification process that they claim follows all essential data security standards, including ensuring that your emails are going to be GDPR-friendly. This is important to note, as if you are contacting GDPR-protected email accounts, you could be accused of sending unsolicited emails without having the right permission to send them.
That is vital for anyone looking to send email marketing material to anyone in the European Union (EU). They also offer a money-back guarantee if you are unhappy with the quality of the results, so that is a nice extra. Given they can provide arguably the fastest email verification solution out there, covering 10,000 email addresses in just 200 minutes, they offer a very vast service for validating the emails that you receive from an email list.
However, that 93% accuracy is a major sticking point. With most ESPs asking you to keep your bounce rate under 4%, an email campaign targeting accept-all email addresses could become dangerous. If that 7% inaccuracy means many of the accept-all addresses slip through the net and are, in fact, invalid, you could have a high bounce rate on your hands.
Neverbounce is, without a doubt, a high-quality tool, but other tools out there are more accurate – especially for validating accept-all email accounts.
How Can You Validate Accept-All Emails On Neverbounce?
The main secret here is to use any email list that you have had cleaned by Neverbounce and run it through Scrubby.io.
Scrubby is one of the only email validation tools out there that offers accurate verification of accept-all email addresses and does not rely upon AI to get results. Scrubby uses an email verification tool that utilizes burner accounts to verify the emails, meaning that your own third-party email provider does not have to worry about your self-verifying emails, leading to high bounce rates.
Marketers use Scrubby if they want to start a cold email campaign and get rid of potentially damaging email addresses. This makes it more likely that emails are received by active email accounts, reducing the risk of future emails landing in someone’s junk email folder.
Scrubby instead gets direct contact to the email server, allowing for direct testing of that email to make sure it is valid. For accept-all email addresses, this can be invaluable in getting rid of invalid accept-all email addresses.
Thanks to directly testing each of the emails using burner accounts, you avoid the risk of false positives and false negatives that are rife with AI. This gives you a much greater level of accuracy, with Scrubby boasting an accuracy of 98.7% – far greater than Neverbounce. For this reason, it is one of the best email validators out there, thanks to its high accuracy.
If you are interested in using accept-all emails as part of your email marketing strategy, having your list cleaned up and scrubbed beforehand is essential. While targeting accept-all emails can find a few hidden gems in terms of potential partners and clients, the risk of invalid accept-all emails should be avoided. By removing as many of these invalid email addresses as you can, you can send emails with confidence.
Scrubby is the only tool on the market that can offer this level of accuracy when it comes to validating risky and accept-all email addresses. Any Neverbounce emails that are on your list that are accept-all should be checked out closely, reducing the risk of incurring needless bounce rates.
This makes it easier to keep a high sender reputation without feeling like you need to toss away those potentially valuable leads. With Scrubby, you can look forward to a higher level of accuracy on accept-all email addresses so you can maximize the number of emails worth including. Try it out for yourself today, and see why Scrubby is the ideal option for validating accept-all emails.
Wrapping Up
So, to conclude, accept-all – or catch-all – emails on Neverbounce are emails that can be used to catch emails that would otherwise have slipped through the cracks. By using these emails, email marketers can find it easier to run campaigns that do not miss out on potential partners simply because they have the wrong email address for that company.
However, these email addresses must be validated before they are contacted. Many catch-all email addresses are either invalid or otherwise not used, which can lead to high bounce rates or low click-through rates. Both issues are bad for any email marketing campaign, so the addresses must be verified beforehand.
By using Scrubby, users can verify and validate their accept-all email addresses in an email list. If you intend to use accept-all email addresses in an email marketing campaign, run them through Scrubby first to remove as many invalid email addresses as possible.
In this article, we have broken down the essential details about accepting all emails in Neverbounce and emails generally and provided you with useful advice on how to validate those emails. Now, you can feel more confident in contacting such addresses.
We hope that this makes it easier for you to make contact with more accept-all email addresses and boosts the volume of responses you get from potential clients.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Are accept-all emails the same as catch-all emails?
- Yes, they are exactly the same thing. The terms are mostly interchangeable, so you can feel confident in using either.
- Are accept-all email addresses safe to contact?
- Yes, as long as they have been verified. By running the addresses through Scrubby, you minimize the risk of high bounce rates and low CTRs.
- Are accept-all emails safe for a business to use?
- Some argue that such email addresses can be dangerous due to the potential for use in phishing and other marketing scams. Broadly, though, they are safe for a business to use.
- Why do businesses use an accept-all email?
- The main reason is that it allows them to avoid missing out on contacts from clients, partners, and suppliers who have contacted an invalid email address, or made a typo in the address.
- Should my business use an accept-all email address?
- It is worth weighing up the pros and cons of using an accept-all email address. They can be very useful, but they need to be closely monitored by someone who is experienced to avoid potential scams.
