Predictive Accept-All Validation: How Global Email Can Validate Accept-All Emails

Accept-all email addresses have posed a persistent challenge to marketing initiatives and the overall effectiveness of email validation. By design, they obscure their true deliverability status from senders, complicating efforts to ensure accurate email outreach. This results in missed opportunities and a damaged sender reputation, undermining your email marketing efforts.

What Is an Accept-All Mailbox?

An accept-all email, also known as a catch-all email, captures messages sent to incorrect or non-existent addresses within a specific domain.

Typos and formatting mistakes are common when entering email addresses. For instance, if someone tries to contact a representative at a brand but guesses the address incorrectly, the message may still be delivered if the domain supports an accept-all inbox.

Many organizations use accept-all emails to ensure they don’t miss important communications. Instead of bouncing messages due to minor errors, the email server routes them to a designated inbox, ensuring nothing critical is overlooked. That being said, accept-all inboxes are notoriously mismanaged and oftentimes neglected, leaving hundreds of “delivered” emails unseen and unopened.

Why Should You Care?

As a marketer or brand representative, you want to make sure that your emails are reaching their intended target and, more importantly, are being engaged with. A lack of engagement not only reduces leads and campaign success, it can also hurt sender reputation. In this way, accept-all servers pose a serious risk for marketing and outreach campaigns.

1. Wasted Marketing Effort and Resources: Many accept-all mailboxes are not actively monitored and often end up accumulating a lot of spam. Time, effort and resources spent on crafting personalized messages go to waste if emails are never read or acted upon. Without knowing whether the message will ever reach the right person, campaigns become less effective.
2. Increased Bounce Rates and Deliverability Issues: Some accept-all servers may still reject emails silently, or become inactive altogether, leading to higher bounce rates over time. This can damage sender reputation, making it harder for future emails to reach the inbox, even for valid recipients.
3. Blacklisting Risks: Accept-all domains may include inactive or spam trap addresses, which are intentionally left open to detect spammers. Sending emails to these addresses can result in blacklisting.
4. Damage to Sender Reputation: Bounces, spam reports, lack of engagement and blacklisting all have negative impacts on your domain or IP reputation. This will affect all future marketing efforts and can prove difficult to recover.

Wasted efforts lead to higher bounce rates, which can lead to blacklisting and damaged reputation, which leads to more wasted efforts and so on.

Enter Global Email’s Predictive Accept-All Feature

Understanding the risks of accept-all emails, it's clear that marketers need a way to check an email address's likelihood to be valid and active, even when dealing with these types of domains. Global Email’s new predictive accept-all capabilities can give you increased confidence.

Using advanced algorithms and a variety of data points, our system predicts the likelihood of an email being active and returns a Deliverability Confidence Score (DCS). The DCS allows you to accurately gauge the risk of sending out an email, even if it belongs to an accept-all domain. These checks involve:

• Historical Activity Data: Evaluating whether the email has seen engagement or been actively used in the past.
• Email and Domain Metadata: Email and domain metadata can provide valuable insight into its activeness.
• Server Authentication Techniques: Probing the server for signs of active mailboxes without triggering spam traps.

The Deliverability Confidence Score scales from 0-100.

Flowchart of checks that lead to meaningful DCS scores for accept-all emails.

For specific guidelines on using the DCS, please visit our documentation.

With Global Email, you can have more confidence in your email verification, reach high-value contacts - even when they belong to accept-all domains – and enjoy improved engagement and optimized marketing outreach. By integrating predictive insights, Melissa ensures your campaigns remain effective, no matter the complexity of your contact lists.

Thank you for your attention to this update. If you have any questions or concerns please contact Tech Support at tech@melissa.com or call 1 (800) 800-6245 x4.