Email Address Validation and Status

Here at Lead Intuition, we use Zero Bounce to validate all contact email addresses our clients provide to us to protect their domain reputation. We have found their results to be accurate and they provide additional checks that many other similar suppliers do not.




Your domain reputation is highly valuable to you as an email marketer. If your domain has a high instance of sending emails to invalid contacts, domains or being reported as Spam, you will experience lower and lower email delivery rates which over time, will ultimately damage or kill your domain reputation.

Zero Bounce has much more on this subject here and we would encourage you to understand this subject as an email marketer.

If you send a marketing email to an invalid address, ActiveDEMAND will unsubscribe the contact automatically to prevent further emails being sent. However, each bounce will impact your reputation, so it's imperative that this is kept to an absolute minimum.

Brief Explanation of Deliverability Status

valid - These are emails that have been 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 validation 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.

alias_address - (valid) These emails addresses act as forwarders/aliases and are not real inboxes, for example if you send an email to 'forward@example.com' and then the email is forwarded to 'realinbox@example.com' It's a valid email address and you can send to them, it's just a little more information about the email address.

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, we 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 spam traps and should not be mailed. Zero Bounce have technology in place to determine if certain emails should be classified as spam trap. They don't know all the spam trap email addresses, but do know a lot of them.

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.


Please always validate a new contact list no matter how good the list supplier tells you that is all clean, valid data.

Updated on: 13/12/2022