Why catch-all verification is a game-changer

Ever heard of a ‘catch-all', ‘accept-all', or a ‘risky' email?

A catch-all email address is an account that receives emails, even when you send to a non-existing email address.

These servers are set up so no email goes missing.

It's important to mention that catch-all addresses are not invalid email addresses. Moreover, they will most often not make you land in the spam folder.

But what to do with a catch-all email address? Just ignore and use the email addresses that are marked as valid? Or find a way to separate a truly risky email account from a valid one?

Especially when you want to reach out to larger companies (that are not start-ups), we strongly suggest: Validate catch-all emails, as they can increase your pipeline considerably.

To substantiate the point, we assessed several data points and ran our own tests. We recognized that the average SMTP email validation tool marks around 21% of the email list belonging to ‘catch-all account‘.

These 21% are often ignored and just sorted out. But think about it like that: You are now shrinking your sales pipeline by 21%. This means you accept that these 21% qualified prospects (with an catch-all address) will never turn into potential customers.

Why catch-all is (not) used

There are several reasons why a company sets up a catch-all email address. Here are a few of them, to help you understand why a company would or would not use a catch-all inbox in the first place.

Advantages of catch-all inboxes

1) Only one inbox

With a catch-all address, there is only one big mailbox where all those emails land. This makes it easier for them to manage their emails, without having to jump between various inboxes. Everything bundled in a single place.

2) No email gets lost

This happened to every single person at least once: writing an email on the go, not paying too much attention. And oops: You sent the email to ‘helk@company.com' instead of ‘help@company.com'. Normally, you would receive an ‘undeliverable' email back. But with catch-all inboxes, your email mostly goes through and finds its way.

3) Better domain reputation

Using catch-all email addresses can help to maintain the reputation of the company's domain. That's because emails that are sent to their domain usually don't bounce back due to an incorrect address. That reduces the risk of their domain being marked as unreliable or unresponsive.

Disadvantages of catch-all inboxes

1) Important vs Spam?

As there are thousands of emails arriving in a single inbox, differentiating between the (ir-)relevant ones can be hard. Sorting out the bad takes time and is tiresome. Even advanced techniques such as filtering can sometimes be inaccurate – the worry might persist: “Was there an important enquiry filtered out?”

2) Spam breeding ground

As we discuss later in the article, many spammers exploit the catch-all advantages. They bulk send unsolicited emails, ransomware, and phishing attempts to as many domains as they can. This quickly transforms an in box into a dangerous minefield.

3) Occasional bounce

Although it does not happen frequently, the chance of emails sent to this domain bouncing back persists. But as this happens more often lately, the probability of domain reputation damage increases.

Easy example

For example:

Andrea bought a digital marketing course from Amazon and has a question to support.

She sends an email to ‘jeffbesos@amazon.com'.

Did you spot the mistake? She misspelled the name.

Will her email bounce back and be marked as undeliverable?

No, because Amazon uses a catch-all server, so that her email will be redirected to the catch-all inbox, where all emails get accepted, and you don't know whether that email really exists.

Amazon uses these servers so no important communication goes missing. A simple typing error shouldn't be the reason why an email doesn't arrive at all.

However, Amazon's catch-all email quickly became an attractive opportunity for spammers. As a result, they even considered to abandon their catch-all inbox and stopped paying attention to it, as it was mostly filled with spam or even phishing/malware emails.

But as they recognized that emails sent to the catch-all server often contain important and business-critical emails, they implemented automatic spam identifiers marking the majority of emails that landed in catch-all inboxes as spam.

How to validate catch-all?

The last years, catch-all emails have been a taboo subject in the outbound community. Why? Because no one knew how they worked, let alone how to validate them.

SMTP-based email verification tools such as DeBounce, NeverBounce, and ZeroBounce, can identify catch-alls, but not (in-)validate them. Knowing if the email address is a catch-all might be good to know, but really identifying and derisking them another thing.

That's why Scrubby was brought to the market a while ago. The SaaS solution is an email verification tool that takes care of your catch-all emails.

They send out blank emails to the email addresses that were identified as ‘catch-all' and observe whether these emails bounce back. As you might imagine, this process normally takes between 48 to 72 hours, as potential bounces can occur up to a few days after sending the email.

By waiting this rather long amount of time, you can be assured that the validation results are extremely accurate.

As you can imagine, this solution was a game-changer for outbound-heavy companies, as they finally were able to do something with their catch-alls. It was now possible to utilize these 21% catch-alls that we mentioned at the beginning were now, and surely know: “That's an email I can send to without harming my sender reputation”.

Catch-all experiment

The founders of Scrubby, who themselves are veterans in the lead enrichment space, experimented. They enriched a list of +100.000 contacts with a single provider email finder and verified them with one of the usual SMTP verification tools (DeBounce, ZeroBounce etc.).

The result was that 41% of their emails were marked as valid, 17% as invalid, and 42% as catch-all email (which is an extraordinarily high amount).

The majority of people would just disregard those 42% catch-all emails, as they are not entirely sure how to deal with them. Instead, they just take the 41% valid emails. As you can imagine, these 42% are opportunities you shouldn't miss out on.

After they ran this list through Scrubby, they were able to recover over 32.000 emails and identify those as valid (out of the 42.000 that have been marked as catch-all). In practice, this means that the catch-all validation increased the email list by over 32%. The best thing is that these 32% are usually prospects that are rarely contacted, because the majority of people disregard their emails marked as catch-all from the beginning.

For those who are doing outbound at scale and as their main revenue driver, sending to catch-all might also be a troublemaker when it comes to campaign analysis. As you don't know for sure, when sending to a catch-all address, whether the prospect receives your emails or not.

As a quick example: If your campaign receives a 20% response rate and 20% of your email list contains catch-all email, you can not work with important rations such as “Open rate”, “Response rate”, because 70% of the catch-all might have never even reached their inbox.

BetterContact

Pretty cool tool, right? You might be thinking now: Very interesting, but my tool stack for lead enrichment is already larger than I would like to – and the budget might be too tight. BetterContact implemented a real-time catch-all verifier.

This is where solutions come in handy that aggregate several lead enrichment data sources in one single tool, without having to manage and buy several subscriptions.

One of them is BetterContact, which recently included Scrubby as an additional validation layer for catch-all emails, besides the usual SMTP-verification.

For each of your lead enrichments, BetterContact verifies your emails with Bouncer, which recognizes and identifies a catch-all email.

But as mentioned, Bouncer is a SMTP verification tool, which only categorizes the verified emails into ‘deliverable', ‘catch-all', ‘undeliverable', and does not validate the ‘catch-all' itself.

The perfect addition: BetterContact Catch-All Validator, that allows to validate those catch-all email.

As soon as BetterContact enriched your contacts and verified your email addresses, you can decide if you want to validate those that have been identified as ‘catch-all' – without having to priorly commit to catch-all validation.

So... How can I use the BetterContact Catch-All Validator?

There are 2 options to use Scrubby:

To reduce unnecessary complexity of your sales stack and keep the costs low, we recommend using BetterContact, which aggregates 15+ data sources such as Apollo, Hunter, and DropContact for email finding, and Bouncer for email validation. If you want to try it out with 50 emails for free, create an account to have an AI email finder and verifier in one tool.

Ever heard of a ‘catch-all', ‘accept-all', or a ‘risky' email?

A catch-all email address is an account that receives emails, even when you send to a non-existing email address.

These servers are set up so no email goes missing.

It's important to mention that catch-all addresses are not invalid email addresses. Moreover, they will most often not make you land in the spam folder.

But what to do with a catch-all email address? Just ignore and use the email addresses that are marked as valid? Or find a way to separate a truly risky email account from a valid one?

Especially when you want to reach out to larger companies (that are not start-ups), we strongly suggest: Validate catch-all emails, as they can increase your pipeline considerably.

To substantiate the point, we assessed several data points and ran our own tests. We recognized that the average SMTP email validation tool marks around 21% of the email list belonging to ‘catch-all account‘.

These 21% are often ignored and just sorted out. But think about it like that: You are now shrinking your sales pipeline by 21%. This means you accept that these 21% qualified prospects (with an catch-all address) will never turn into potential customers.

Why catch-all is (not) used

There are several reasons why a company sets up a catch-all email address. Here are a few of them, to help you understand why a company would or would not use a catch-all inbox in the first place.

Advantages of catch-all inboxes

1) Only one inbox

With a catch-all address, there is only one big mailbox where all those emails land. This makes it easier for them to manage their emails, without having to jump between various inboxes. Everything bundled in a single place.

2) No email gets lost

This happened to every single person at least once: writing an email on the go, not paying too much attention. And oops: You sent the email to ‘helk@company.com' instead of ‘help@company.com'. Normally, you would receive an ‘undeliverable' email back. But with catch-all inboxes, your email mostly goes through and finds its way.

3) Better domain reputation

Using catch-all email addresses can help to maintain the reputation of the company's domain. That's because emails that are sent to their domain usually don't bounce back due to an incorrect address. That reduces the risk of their domain being marked as unreliable or unresponsive.

Disadvantages of catch-all inboxes

1) Important vs Spam?

As there are thousands of emails arriving in a single inbox, differentiating between the (ir-)relevant ones can be hard. Sorting out the bad takes time and is tiresome. Even advanced techniques such as filtering can sometimes be inaccurate – the worry might persist: “Was there an important enquiry filtered out?”

2) Spam breeding ground

As we discuss later in the article, many spammers exploit the catch-all advantages. They bulk send unsolicited emails, ransomware, and phishing attempts to as many domains as they can. This quickly transforms an in box into a dangerous minefield.

3) Occasional bounce

Although it does not happen frequently, the chance of emails sent to this domain bouncing back persists. But as this happens more often lately, the probability of domain reputation damage increases.

Easy example

For example:

Andrea bought a digital marketing course from Amazon and has a question to support.

She sends an email to ‘jeffbesos@amazon.com'.

Did you spot the mistake? She misspelled the name.

Will her email bounce back and be marked as undeliverable?

No, because Amazon uses a catch-all server, so that her email will be redirected to the catch-all inbox, where all emails get accepted, and you don't know whether that email really exists.

Amazon uses these servers so no important communication goes missing. A simple typing error shouldn't be the reason why an email doesn't arrive at all.

However, Amazon's catch-all email quickly became an attractive opportunity for spammers. As a result, they even considered to abandon their catch-all inbox and stopped paying attention to it, as it was mostly filled with spam or even phishing/malware emails.

But as they recognized that emails sent to the catch-all server often contain important and business-critical emails, they implemented automatic spam identifiers marking the majority of emails that landed in catch-all inboxes as spam.

How to validate catch-all?

The last years, catch-all emails have been a taboo subject in the outbound community. Why? Because no one knew how they worked, let alone how to validate them.

SMTP-based email verification tools such as DeBounce, NeverBounce, and ZeroBounce, can identify catch-alls, but not (in-)validate them. Knowing if the email address is a catch-all might be good to know, but really identifying and derisking them another thing.

That's why Scrubby was brought to the market a while ago. The SaaS solution is an email verification tool that takes care of your catch-all emails.

They send out blank emails to the email addresses that were identified as ‘catch-all' and observe whether these emails bounce back. As you might imagine, this process normally takes between 48 to 72 hours, as potential bounces can occur up to a few days after sending the email.

By waiting this rather long amount of time, you can be assured that the validation results are extremely accurate.

As you can imagine, this solution was a game-changer for outbound-heavy companies, as they finally were able to do something with their catch-alls. It was now possible to utilize these 21% catch-alls that we mentioned at the beginning were now, and surely know: “That's an email I can send to without harming my sender reputation”.

Catch-all experiment

The founders of Scrubby, who themselves are veterans in the lead enrichment space, experimented. They enriched a list of +100.000 contacts with a single provider email finder and verified them with one of the usual SMTP verification tools (DeBounce, ZeroBounce etc.).

The result was that 41% of their emails were marked as valid, 17% as invalid, and 42% as catch-all email (which is an extraordinarily high amount).

The majority of people would just disregard those 42% catch-all emails, as they are not entirely sure how to deal with them. Instead, they just take the 41% valid emails. As you can imagine, these 42% are opportunities you shouldn't miss out on.

After they ran this list through Scrubby, they were able to recover over 32.000 emails and identify those as valid (out of the 42.000 that have been marked as catch-all). In practice, this means that the catch-all validation increased the email list by over 32%. The best thing is that these 32% are usually prospects that are rarely contacted, because the majority of people disregard their emails marked as catch-all from the beginning.

For those who are doing outbound at scale and as their main revenue driver, sending to catch-all might also be a troublemaker when it comes to campaign analysis. As you don't know for sure, when sending to a catch-all address, whether the prospect receives your emails or not.

As a quick example: If your campaign receives a 20% response rate and 20% of your email list contains catch-all email, you can not work with important rations such as “Open rate”, “Response rate”, because 70% of the catch-all might have never even reached their inbox.

BetterContact

Pretty cool tool, right? You might be thinking now: Very interesting, but my tool stack for lead enrichment is already larger than I would like to – and the budget might be too tight. BetterContact implemented a real-time catch-all verifier.

This is where solutions come in handy that aggregate several lead enrichment data sources in one single tool, without having to manage and buy several subscriptions.

One of them is BetterContact, which recently included Scrubby as an additional validation layer for catch-all emails, besides the usual SMTP-verification.

For each of your lead enrichments, BetterContact verifies your emails with Bouncer, which recognizes and identifies a catch-all email.

But as mentioned, Bouncer is a SMTP verification tool, which only categorizes the verified emails into ‘deliverable', ‘catch-all', ‘undeliverable', and does not validate the ‘catch-all' itself.

The perfect addition: BetterContact Catch-All Validator, that allows to validate those catch-all email.

As soon as BetterContact enriched your contacts and verified your email addresses, you can decide if you want to validate those that have been identified as ‘catch-all' – without having to priorly commit to catch-all validation.

So... How can I use the BetterContact Catch-All Validator?

There are 2 options to use Scrubby:

To reduce unnecessary complexity of your sales stack and keep the costs low, we recommend using BetterContact, which aggregates 15+ data sources such as Apollo, Hunter, and DropContact for email finding, and Bouncer for email validation. If you want to try it out with 50 emails for free, create an account to have an AI email finder and verifier in one tool.

Ever heard of a ‘catch-all', ‘accept-all', or a ‘risky' email?

A catch-all email address is an account that receives emails, even when you send to a non-existing email address.

These servers are set up so no email goes missing.

It's important to mention that catch-all addresses are not invalid email addresses. Moreover, they will most often not make you land in the spam folder.

But what to do with a catch-all email address? Just ignore and use the email addresses that are marked as valid? Or find a way to separate a truly risky email account from a valid one?

Especially when you want to reach out to larger companies (that are not start-ups), we strongly suggest: Validate catch-all emails, as they can increase your pipeline considerably.

To substantiate the point, we assessed several data points and ran our own tests. We recognized that the average SMTP email validation tool marks around 21% of the email list belonging to ‘catch-all account‘.

These 21% are often ignored and just sorted out. But think about it like that: You are now shrinking your sales pipeline by 21%. This means you accept that these 21% qualified prospects (with an catch-all address) will never turn into potential customers.

Why catch-all is (not) used

There are several reasons why a company sets up a catch-all email address. Here are a few of them, to help you understand why a company would or would not use a catch-all inbox in the first place.

Advantages of catch-all inboxes

1) Only one inbox

With a catch-all address, there is only one big mailbox where all those emails land. This makes it easier for them to manage their emails, without having to jump between various inboxes. Everything bundled in a single place.

2) No email gets lost

This happened to every single person at least once: writing an email on the go, not paying too much attention. And oops: You sent the email to ‘helk@company.com' instead of ‘help@company.com'. Normally, you would receive an ‘undeliverable' email back. But with catch-all inboxes, your email mostly goes through and finds its way.

3) Better domain reputation

Using catch-all email addresses can help to maintain the reputation of the company's domain. That's because emails that are sent to their domain usually don't bounce back due to an incorrect address. That reduces the risk of their domain being marked as unreliable or unresponsive.

Disadvantages of catch-all inboxes

1) Important vs Spam?

As there are thousands of emails arriving in a single inbox, differentiating between the (ir-)relevant ones can be hard. Sorting out the bad takes time and is tiresome. Even advanced techniques such as filtering can sometimes be inaccurate – the worry might persist: “Was there an important enquiry filtered out?”

2) Spam breeding ground

As we discuss later in the article, many spammers exploit the catch-all advantages. They bulk send unsolicited emails, ransomware, and phishing attempts to as many domains as they can. This quickly transforms an in box into a dangerous minefield.

3) Occasional bounce

Although it does not happen frequently, the chance of emails sent to this domain bouncing back persists. But as this happens more often lately, the probability of domain reputation damage increases.

Easy example

For example:

Andrea bought a digital marketing course from Amazon and has a question to support.

She sends an email to ‘jeffbesos@amazon.com'.

Did you spot the mistake? She misspelled the name.

Will her email bounce back and be marked as undeliverable?

No, because Amazon uses a catch-all server, so that her email will be redirected to the catch-all inbox, where all emails get accepted, and you don't know whether that email really exists.

Amazon uses these servers so no important communication goes missing. A simple typing error shouldn't be the reason why an email doesn't arrive at all.

However, Amazon's catch-all email quickly became an attractive opportunity for spammers. As a result, they even considered to abandon their catch-all inbox and stopped paying attention to it, as it was mostly filled with spam or even phishing/malware emails.

But as they recognized that emails sent to the catch-all server often contain important and business-critical emails, they implemented automatic spam identifiers marking the majority of emails that landed in catch-all inboxes as spam.

How to validate catch-all?

The last years, catch-all emails have been a taboo subject in the outbound community. Why? Because no one knew how they worked, let alone how to validate them.

SMTP-based email verification tools such as DeBounce, NeverBounce, and ZeroBounce, can identify catch-alls, but not (in-)validate them. Knowing if the email address is a catch-all might be good to know, but really identifying and derisking them another thing.

That's why Scrubby was brought to the market a while ago. The SaaS solution is an email verification tool that takes care of your catch-all emails.

They send out blank emails to the email addresses that were identified as ‘catch-all' and observe whether these emails bounce back. As you might imagine, this process normally takes between 48 to 72 hours, as potential bounces can occur up to a few days after sending the email.

By waiting this rather long amount of time, you can be assured that the validation results are extremely accurate.

As you can imagine, this solution was a game-changer for outbound-heavy companies, as they finally were able to do something with their catch-alls. It was now possible to utilize these 21% catch-alls that we mentioned at the beginning were now, and surely know: “That's an email I can send to without harming my sender reputation”.

Catch-all experiment

The founders of Scrubby, who themselves are veterans in the lead enrichment space, experimented. They enriched a list of +100.000 contacts with a single provider email finder and verified them with one of the usual SMTP verification tools (DeBounce, ZeroBounce etc.).

The result was that 41% of their emails were marked as valid, 17% as invalid, and 42% as catch-all email (which is an extraordinarily high amount).

The majority of people would just disregard those 42% catch-all emails, as they are not entirely sure how to deal with them. Instead, they just take the 41% valid emails. As you can imagine, these 42% are opportunities you shouldn't miss out on.

After they ran this list through Scrubby, they were able to recover over 32.000 emails and identify those as valid (out of the 42.000 that have been marked as catch-all). In practice, this means that the catch-all validation increased the email list by over 32%. The best thing is that these 32% are usually prospects that are rarely contacted, because the majority of people disregard their emails marked as catch-all from the beginning.

For those who are doing outbound at scale and as their main revenue driver, sending to catch-all might also be a troublemaker when it comes to campaign analysis. As you don't know for sure, when sending to a catch-all address, whether the prospect receives your emails or not.

As a quick example: If your campaign receives a 20% response rate and 20% of your email list contains catch-all email, you can not work with important rations such as “Open rate”, “Response rate”, because 70% of the catch-all might have never even reached their inbox.

BetterContact

Pretty cool tool, right? You might be thinking now: Very interesting, but my tool stack for lead enrichment is already larger than I would like to – and the budget might be too tight. BetterContact implemented a real-time catch-all verifier.

This is where solutions come in handy that aggregate several lead enrichment data sources in one single tool, without having to manage and buy several subscriptions.

One of them is BetterContact, which recently included Scrubby as an additional validation layer for catch-all emails, besides the usual SMTP-verification.

For each of your lead enrichments, BetterContact verifies your emails with Bouncer, which recognizes and identifies a catch-all email.

But as mentioned, Bouncer is a SMTP verification tool, which only categorizes the verified emails into ‘deliverable', ‘catch-all', ‘undeliverable', and does not validate the ‘catch-all' itself.

The perfect addition: BetterContact Catch-All Validator, that allows to validate those catch-all email.

As soon as BetterContact enriched your contacts and verified your email addresses, you can decide if you want to validate those that have been identified as ‘catch-all' – without having to priorly commit to catch-all validation.

So... How can I use the BetterContact Catch-All Validator?

There are 2 options to use Scrubby:

To reduce unnecessary complexity of your sales stack and keep the costs low, we recommend using BetterContact, which aggregates 15+ data sources such as Apollo, Hunter, and DropContact for email finding, and Bouncer for email validation. If you want to try it out with 50 emails for free, create an account to have an AI email finder and verifier in one tool.

Ever heard of a ‘catch-all', ‘accept-all', or a ‘risky' email?

A catch-all email address is an account that receives emails, even when you send to a non-existing email address.

These servers are set up so no email goes missing.

It's important to mention that catch-all addresses are not invalid email addresses. Moreover, they will most often not make you land in the spam folder.

But what to do with a catch-all email address? Just ignore and use the email addresses that are marked as valid? Or find a way to separate a truly risky email account from a valid one?

Especially when you want to reach out to larger companies (that are not start-ups), we strongly suggest: Validate catch-all emails, as they can increase your pipeline considerably.

To substantiate the point, we assessed several data points and ran our own tests. We recognized that the average SMTP email validation tool marks around 21% of the email list belonging to ‘catch-all account‘.

These 21% are often ignored and just sorted out. But think about it like that: You are now shrinking your sales pipeline by 21%. This means you accept that these 21% qualified prospects (with an catch-all address) will never turn into potential customers.

Why catch-all is (not) used

There are several reasons why a company sets up a catch-all email address. Here are a few of them, to help you understand why a company would or would not use a catch-all inbox in the first place.

Advantages of catch-all inboxes

1) Only one inbox

With a catch-all address, there is only one big mailbox where all those emails land. This makes it easier for them to manage their emails, without having to jump between various inboxes. Everything bundled in a single place.

2) No email gets lost

This happened to every single person at least once: writing an email on the go, not paying too much attention. And oops: You sent the email to ‘helk@company.com' instead of ‘help@company.com'. Normally, you would receive an ‘undeliverable' email back. But with catch-all inboxes, your email mostly goes through and finds its way.

3) Better domain reputation

Using catch-all email addresses can help to maintain the reputation of the company's domain. That's because emails that are sent to their domain usually don't bounce back due to an incorrect address. That reduces the risk of their domain being marked as unreliable or unresponsive.

Disadvantages of catch-all inboxes

1) Important vs Spam?

As there are thousands of emails arriving in a single inbox, differentiating between the (ir-)relevant ones can be hard. Sorting out the bad takes time and is tiresome. Even advanced techniques such as filtering can sometimes be inaccurate – the worry might persist: “Was there an important enquiry filtered out?”

2) Spam breeding ground

As we discuss later in the article, many spammers exploit the catch-all advantages. They bulk send unsolicited emails, ransomware, and phishing attempts to as many domains as they can. This quickly transforms an in box into a dangerous minefield.

3) Occasional bounce

Although it does not happen frequently, the chance of emails sent to this domain bouncing back persists. But as this happens more often lately, the probability of domain reputation damage increases.

Easy example

For example:

Andrea bought a digital marketing course from Amazon and has a question to support.

She sends an email to ‘jeffbesos@amazon.com'.

Did you spot the mistake? She misspelled the name.

Will her email bounce back and be marked as undeliverable?

No, because Amazon uses a catch-all server, so that her email will be redirected to the catch-all inbox, where all emails get accepted, and you don't know whether that email really exists.

Amazon uses these servers so no important communication goes missing. A simple typing error shouldn't be the reason why an email doesn't arrive at all.

However, Amazon's catch-all email quickly became an attractive opportunity for spammers. As a result, they even considered to abandon their catch-all inbox and stopped paying attention to it, as it was mostly filled with spam or even phishing/malware emails.

But as they recognized that emails sent to the catch-all server often contain important and business-critical emails, they implemented automatic spam identifiers marking the majority of emails that landed in catch-all inboxes as spam.

How to validate catch-all?

The last years, catch-all emails have been a taboo subject in the outbound community. Why? Because no one knew how they worked, let alone how to validate them.

SMTP-based email verification tools such as DeBounce, NeverBounce, and ZeroBounce, can identify catch-alls, but not (in-)validate them. Knowing if the email address is a catch-all might be good to know, but really identifying and derisking them another thing.

That's why Scrubby was brought to the market a while ago. The SaaS solution is an email verification tool that takes care of your catch-all emails.

They send out blank emails to the email addresses that were identified as ‘catch-all' and observe whether these emails bounce back. As you might imagine, this process normally takes between 48 to 72 hours, as potential bounces can occur up to a few days after sending the email.

By waiting this rather long amount of time, you can be assured that the validation results are extremely accurate.

As you can imagine, this solution was a game-changer for outbound-heavy companies, as they finally were able to do something with their catch-alls. It was now possible to utilize these 21% catch-alls that we mentioned at the beginning were now, and surely know: “That's an email I can send to without harming my sender reputation”.

Catch-all experiment

The founders of Scrubby, who themselves are veterans in the lead enrichment space, experimented. They enriched a list of +100.000 contacts with a single provider email finder and verified them with one of the usual SMTP verification tools (DeBounce, ZeroBounce etc.).

The result was that 41% of their emails were marked as valid, 17% as invalid, and 42% as catch-all email (which is an extraordinarily high amount).

The majority of people would just disregard those 42% catch-all emails, as they are not entirely sure how to deal with them. Instead, they just take the 41% valid emails. As you can imagine, these 42% are opportunities you shouldn't miss out on.

After they ran this list through Scrubby, they were able to recover over 32.000 emails and identify those as valid (out of the 42.000 that have been marked as catch-all). In practice, this means that the catch-all validation increased the email list by over 32%. The best thing is that these 32% are usually prospects that are rarely contacted, because the majority of people disregard their emails marked as catch-all from the beginning.

For those who are doing outbound at scale and as their main revenue driver, sending to catch-all might also be a troublemaker when it comes to campaign analysis. As you don't know for sure, when sending to a catch-all address, whether the prospect receives your emails or not.

As a quick example: If your campaign receives a 20% response rate and 20% of your email list contains catch-all email, you can not work with important rations such as “Open rate”, “Response rate”, because 70% of the catch-all might have never even reached their inbox.

BetterContact

Pretty cool tool, right? You might be thinking now: Very interesting, but my tool stack for lead enrichment is already larger than I would like to – and the budget might be too tight. BetterContact implemented a real-time catch-all verifier.

This is where solutions come in handy that aggregate several lead enrichment data sources in one single tool, without having to manage and buy several subscriptions.

One of them is BetterContact, which recently included Scrubby as an additional validation layer for catch-all emails, besides the usual SMTP-verification.

For each of your lead enrichments, BetterContact verifies your emails with Bouncer, which recognizes and identifies a catch-all email.

But as mentioned, Bouncer is a SMTP verification tool, which only categorizes the verified emails into ‘deliverable', ‘catch-all', ‘undeliverable', and does not validate the ‘catch-all' itself.

The perfect addition: BetterContact Catch-All Validator, that allows to validate those catch-all email.

As soon as BetterContact enriched your contacts and verified your email addresses, you can decide if you want to validate those that have been identified as ‘catch-all' – without having to priorly commit to catch-all validation.

So... How can I use the BetterContact Catch-All Validator?

There are 2 options to use Scrubby:

To reduce unnecessary complexity of your sales stack and keep the costs low, we recommend using BetterContact, which aggregates 15+ data sources such as Apollo, Hunter, and DropContact for email finding, and Bouncer for email validation. If you want to try it out with 50 emails for free, create an account to have an AI email finder and verifier in one tool.