How To Verify Catch-All Emails With Ease

How would it affect your business if you had no accurate data for a fifth (or more!) of your potential clients? Would that impact your bottom line?

I’ll bet it would.

In this article we’ll review how Catch-All emails affect your outreach.

And we’ll look at 10 ways to verify Catch-All emails with relative ease.

Let’s get started!

What Are Catch-All Emails, And Why Do They Suck?

When you validate a normal email address the server is ‘pinged’. If the email address is correct then the server sends a positive reply and you know the email is valid.

If the email isn’t correct then the server returns an error message.

correct.email@example-company.com ✅

bad.email@example-company.com ❌

Using this methodology, it’s easy to validate the accuracy of an email address.

Unfortunately, Catch-All emails (also known as Accept-All emails) exist, too.

The server will approve these emails regardless of whether the email address actually exists, or not.

So if you ping the server with an incorrect email address it will return an ‘OK’ response. Even though the email isn’t on the server network.

correct.email@example-company.com ✅

bad.email@example-company.com ✅

As you can imagine, these emails are horrible for outreach campaigns. There’s a good chance the email you’re using will bounce. Which can affect your email delivery.

According to Zero Bounce, about 16% of your prospects are using a catch-all email address. And in our experience the number is often well above 20%.

So if Catch-All emails are no good then what can you do about them?

Well, here are 10 ways to avoid contacting invalid Catch-All emails.

Use Instantly.ai For Outreach

Instantly is one of the most innovative outreach tools available today.

And since they have wide adoption in the outreach community they are responsible for sending millions of emails every day.

So guess what?

They KNOW which Catch-All emails are going to bounce. And which ones are ok. They have the bounce reports to prove it!

They’ve taken these insights and built them right into their internal verification tool.

Which is awesome. You don’t need to repeat someone else’s outreach missteps.

Validate Catch-All Emails By Reaching Out

The simplest way to find out whether an email address works is to just send them an email.

If it bounces then it’s not valid (duh).

Easy.

Verify Catch-All Emails At Small Scale

While NOT recommended, one way to contact catch-all emails for verification purposes is to just set up a few ‘burner’ email addresses across various free providers.

Load your list into a BCC field and send off a nonsense email.

Any that bounce back should be removed from your list.

It’s ugly, but it works.

Keep in mind the free email providers HATE this and will make every effort to prevent you from using their systems in this way.

Considering the amount of frustration involved, I recommend using one of the other methods below.

Use Scrubby.io

Scrubby uses their own network of disposable email addresses to contact your prospects to see if the email address is valid.

The process isn’t as fast as you’d expect because the bounce reports can take up to 48 hours to fully propagate.

It sucks to wait, but it is what it is.

I’ve used Scrubby a few times and it works well. The only downside is the credits are a bit expensive.

Use ListMint

Similar to the above, ListMint sends emails to validate accept-all emails. So it takes about 48 hours to fully validate your email list.

Plans are designed so you don’t need to split verifications between ‘Regular Emails’ and ‘Catch-all Emails’. You can use ListMint for both which saves cleaning steps and potential mistakes.

Credits are relatively inexpensive (on a per credit basis). But (at the time of writing) they only offer monthly subscription plans. Which may not fit the needs of ad hoc users.

Use Bouncer

Bouncer is a leading email verification tool. And it’s worth mentioning that it’s my personal favourite tool for email verification.

Please note that Bouncer is NOT designed to validate catch-all emails, specifically.

So why include them on this list?

Well, Bouncer has pretty good ‘Deep Catch-All Verification’ technology. We’ve found they can rescue a large percent of catch-all emails. It’s not 100%, but they do a great job of validating accept-all emails that would otherwise get lost.

Highly recommended tool!

Use BounceBan

Unlike several of the options above, BounceBan doesn’t email your prospects to see whether their email address is working, or not.

This makes it much faster for them to check your emails as they don’t need to wait 48 hours for all bounce returns to come in.

Notably, “BounceBan guarantees that it can reliably verify 83%+ of email addresses that are accept-all with a 97%+ accuracy.”

If you’re just doing a couple of emails then BounceBan allows individual checks to be done for free.

Also, the cost per credit is quite low compared with their direct competitors. So this may be the perfect tool for your outreach tech stack.

Use Catch-all Verifier

Catch-all Verifier is another catch-all validation tool. They aren’t very clear about their validation methodology. So I’m not certain whether they contact email addresses, or not.

Pricing is quite reasonable. It’s much cheaper than Scrubby and only slightly more expensive than BounceBan.

Use Google People Chips

Another way to validate Google Catch-All email accounts is to convert your email addresses into Google People Chips in Google Sheets.

Note, this approach does NOT validate an email address. But it does indicate that an account with that email exists.

The process itself is straightforward.

Create a column of email addresses in Column A
Duplicate your column of catch-all emails into Column B
Highlight the emails in Column B. Right click and convert them into ‘People Chips’. You’ll notice that many of the emails are converted into people’s names.
In Column C write =NOT(A2=B2) and extend it to the rest of the column.
This will produce a ‘True / False’ result.

One thing to note is just because a valid people chip wasn’t found for an email address DOESN’T mean it’s invalid. It just means Google doesn’t have a ‘People Chip’ associated to that email address.

Use Google Accounts

Another easy way to see if a Google Account is valid is to navigate to ‘Google Accounts’.

Paste in the email address to the account.

If it’s a valid account then Google will go on to the next step, which is to input the password.

If the email isn’t a valid Google account then you’ll get an error message.

This isn’t something you want to do at scale. And it only works for Google accounts. But it’s still a cool way to check whether an account exists for an email address.

Use The Email Pattern

One final way to verify catch-all emails is to rely on probability.

Most companies use the same email pattern for all of their employees. For example, {first}.{last}@company.com

Confirm whether your prospect is still working at the company. If they are then the pattern will probably work and you can send your message.

This method works ‘most’ of the time, but certainly isn’t perfect.

The person you’re contacting may have left the company.

They may be using a different email pattern.

Or their name might be subject to variations – ie Matthew / Matt.

In which case your message won’t be successful.

But with a bit of research you can get a very high hit rate and ‘rescue’ opportunities that would otherwise have been lost.

How Do You Validate Catch-All Emails?

How about you? What methods do you use to verify accept-all emails? I’d love to hear what tools or tactics have worked for you.

You can contact me on Linkedin or send me a note on our contact page.