How to check the quality of your email addresses

Bounces hurt your sending reputation, and most of them come from addresses that were never going to work: gamil.com for gmail.com, a domain that does not exist, a throwaway mailbox. The email quality check looks at every contact in your workspace and flags those addresses, so you can fix or leave them out before a campaign goes.

What the check does

It runs only when you press the button. It never changes a contact, never unsubscribes anyone and never stops a send by itself: it gives each contact a traffic light and the reasons, and you decide what to do. Nothing leaves SendBeam except a look at each domain's public mail records (DNS).

Running a check

On the Contacts page choose Check email quality. A bar shows progress while the check works through your contacts in the background, and a summary appears when it is done: how many are good, how many to review and how many are likely to bounce. Only one check runs at a time in a workspace. Opening Contacts on a list first, then choosing the button, checks that list.

Reading the traffic light

• Good (tick): no problem found.
• Review (exclamation mark): worth a look, for example a shared mailbox such as info@, a duplicate, or an address that looks like a test.
• Likely to bounce (cross): malformed, a domain that cannot receive mail, a mistyped domain, a disposable mailbox, or an address SendBeam already holds as bounced or suppressed.
• Not checked (dash): added since the last check.

The status never relies on colour alone: each has its own mark and word, and the reason is written out under the address, which is also what you see on a phone. You can filter the list by quality and sort the worst first.

What is checked

• The address is well formed: an @, no spaces, no doubled dots, no characters that cannot be used, not too long.
• The domain exists and has a mail server (or an address record), is not a null-MX domain that says it takes no mail, and its mail does not go to a parking service.
• The domain is a known typo (gamil.com, hotmial.com) or ends in a typo such as .con, with the correction suggested.
• The domain is a disposable mailbox service.
• The part before the @ is a shared role such as info, admin or noreply.
• SendBeam already holds the address as bounced, complained, unsubscribed or blocked.
• The same address appears more than once once capital letters and +tags are ignored.
• The address looks like a test: test@, asdf@, only digits, or a long run of one character.

The rules are kept up to date by SendBeam; a result remembers which version of the rules produced it.

Fixing typos

When the fix is obvious, the row offers it: Use gmail.com changes the address in one click. To correct many at once, tick the contacts and choose Fix typos in the bulk bar: only contacts the check found a correction for are changed, and a correction that would clash with an existing contact or land on a suppressed address is skipped and reported. To keep a risky address out of your sends without deleting it, choose Archive: archived contacts are never mailed and can be restored. See bulk actions.

Plans and daily limits

The email quality check is on the Starter, Pro and Business plans. On Free the button is still there and explains the upgrade. If you downgrade, the flags already stored stay visible, read-only, and no new checks run until you upgrade again. Each workspace can have a limited number of contacts checked per day (a check that reaches it pauses and carries on the next day).