Email Verification Results Guide

The email address belongs to a real person at a real domain. The mailbox exists, accepts email, and is actively in use. This is your highest-quality segment.

55–76% of a typical list. Across QEV’s verification systems, SafeToSend rates range from 67% to 79% depending on list source and quality.

Fewer than 0.5% of emails bounce back as undeliverable. Normal opens, clicks, and replies from real people. These addresses behave exactly as you’d expect.

Send confidently. This is your core sending segment.

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The company’s email system is configured to accept email sent to any address at their domain — whether it exists or not. You could email completely-made-up-name@theirdomain.com and it would go through — but nobody would read it because that person doesn’t exist.

5–20% of lists, depending on source. B2B lists from prospecting tools like Apollo or ZoomInfo skew higher. Across QEV’s bulk verification systems, accept-all rates average 14–15%.

Deliverability ranges from 40–85% (based on EmailAddress.ai data across 200M+ records). Catch-all addresses are 27x more likely to bounce than standard addresses (Prospeo data). Many bounces arrive 72+ hours later — delayed bounces that hit after your campaign looks “clean.”

Never mix with safe-to-send. Skip for outbound and marketing sends, or separate into small, carefully paced batches. Skipping 15% of your list feels like waste — you paid for those leads. But sending costs more: one domain getting flagged as untrustworthy by Gmail and Outlook means $200+ to set up and warm a replacement (gradually building sending reputation over weeks) — plus weeks of zero outbound email while you wait. Verification costs $0.006/email.

Full catch-all guide →
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Addresses like info@, admin@, sales@, support@. These go to a shared inbox or distribution list — no individual owner. Nobody “monitors” info@ the way they monitor their personal inbox.

3–8% of B2B lists (typical estimate).

These addresses bounce 2–3x more than emails to a real person’s inbox. Almost nobody opens marketing emails from them. Spam complaints are higher because multiple people access the inbox — anyone can flag your message. Most ESPs like VerticalResponse and Higher Logic auto-reject role addresses on upload.

Remove from marketing and outbound email. Keep for transactional messages (order confirmations, support tickets) only.

Full role-based guide →
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Temporary addresses from services like Guerrilla Mail, Temp Mail, or Mailinator. Created to avoid giving a real email, and they self-destruct within hours or days.

0.5-5% of lists, depending on source. QEV’s real-time Single API sees a consistent 1% disposable rate. That’s roughly 3-4x higher than bulk uploads, indicating more fraud attempts at the point of signup.

100% hard bounce within days. The address simply stops existing.

Remove immediately. Never send. More importantly: catch them at signup with real-time API verification so they never enter your database.

Full disposable guide →
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A real person using a free email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.) instead of a business domain. The address itself is valid — but for B2B purposes, it may indicate a personal account rather than a business contact.

10–20% of B2B lists. Higher for inbound and self-serve signups. QEV data shows free email providers account for 52–74% of all verifications, though B2B-specific lists are much lower.

Low bounce risk. Open and click rates vary. Gmail’s spam filtering is the strictest — low Gmail engagement affects all your sends disproportionately (industry-wide pattern).

Keep, but send to them separately from your main list. For B2B outreach: flag as possibly wrong contact. For inbound marketing: perfectly fine to send to.

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The email address does not exist. The domain may be wrong, the mailbox may have been closed, or it’s a typo. The mail server has confirmed: this address cannot receive email.

5–9% of lists depending on source and age. QEV data shows invalid rates of 5–10% across systems. Sourced data is worse: intent data 3–5%, LinkedIn extractors 5–8%, scraped 12–20%, purchased lists 15–30% (practitioner data).

100% hard bounce. Immediate. If more than 2% bounce back as undeliverable, Gmail and Outlook flag your domain — your future emails start landing in spam instead of the inbox — your emails go to spam instead of the inbox.

Remove. Never retry. Check QEV’s did_you_mean field for typo corrections; misspelled, popular free email service addresses (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo etc.) can be recovered.

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The email address appears to contain a typo in the domain name — for example, mary@gnail.com instead of mary@gmail.com. QEV flags the address as invalid but also suggests the corrected version, giving you a chance to recover a real contact.

1–3% of lists, depending on how addresses were collected. Form submissions without real-time validation tend to have higher typo rates.

Hard bounce, mostly. The misspelled domain either doesn’t exist or routes to the wrong server. The email will never reach the intended recipient.

Review the suggestion and correct. If QEV’s did_you_mean field suggests a correction, update the address in your list. This recovers a real contact that would otherwise be lost as invalid.

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The mail server didn’t respond during verification. This could be a temporary server issue, the server was temporarily busy, or it uses a system that delays responses to filter out spam bots. The address might be valid — we just can’t confirm it right now.

2–8% of results. QEV data shows unknown rates of 1.6–8.7% across different verification systems.

Unpredictable. Could deliver fine, could bounce.

Retry later. If still unknown after 2 attempts, treat as risky. Do not include in your primary sending segment.

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