What is SMTP and CatchAll Email Validation?

SMTP: The Postman of the Internet

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. Think of it as the diligent postman of the internet, ensuring your email reaches the recipient's inbox. 📬SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the backbone of email delivery, handling the sending of emails from one server to another.

An SMTP check can determine if an email address is valid and able to accept mail. This is a crucial step in today's cold email environment as the major ESPs (Email Service Providers) like Google and Microsoft look at bounce rate as a crucial metric to determine which senders get sent to spam, or to the primary inbox. Having a sub 1% bounce rate is critical.

What About Catch All Emails?

CatchAll emails are like nets that catch all emails sent to a domain, even if the address is incorrect. Handy, right? But here's the catch - you don't want to fall into the trap of sending emails to these addresses unknowingly. While this might seem beneficial at first glance, it poses a risk for marketers as it can skew the accuracy of engagement metrics and increase the chances of being marked as spam. You can unknowingly be registering bounces with these types of email addresses. Luckily there are providers that assist in validating these types of emails as well.

The Impact on Cold Emailing

The essence of cold emailing lies in reaching potential customers who are not yet familiar with your brand. You already run some risk of annoying these prospects and so the last thing you want is to be unnecessarily indicating to the ESPs that you are cold-sending to lists you've purchased somewhere by bouncing at a high rate.

The success rate of these campaigns heavily relies on your emails being delivered and seen. Invalid email addresses, which are either non-existent or incorrect, directly affect your campaign's delivery rate, wasting resources and potentially harming your sender reputation. By employing SMTP and Catch All email validation, you ensure that your emails reach valid and active email addresses, thereby improving your overall campaign performance.

Top Providers:

1) MillionVerifier - A simple, easty to use Email Validation Service.

2) ZeroBounce - Purchased by ZoomInfo, a solid Email Validation Provider.

3) ListKit - It's super annoying to buy a list from Apollo or ZoomInfo, and THEN have to validate your emails. ListKit validates each time you pull a list!

4) Clearout - Just like the name implies, this service validates emails and clears out your invalids for your campaigns.

5) DeBounce - A solid provider with a great Clay integration!

6) Scrubby - What happens when you have Catch-All Emails? You can upload these to Scrubby and receive back confirmed valid email addresses using their unique system that sends emails to each address individually to confirm!