Accounts here are usually large and assembled from several sources, because the price point attracts volume. The export is big enough that reading it by eye is not an option and sampling is.
Getting the addresses out of Elastic Email
Contacts, apply a filter, then export, or pull them through the API.
Before anything reaches the platform. Suspension here is quick and total, and the cost of a check is a rounding error against losing every sending stream at once.
What Elastic Email does with the file you bring back
The import rules decide what a re-import actually changes, which is worth knowing before you upload.
The short version
- Imports match on email and update the existing contact.
- Suppressed addresses stay suppressed through an import.
- The API supports bulk operations, which is the normal path at volume.
- Large imports on a new account attract review before sending is released.
The mistake to avoid
Some addresses come back unresolved, and that is a fact about the receiving server rather than a gap in the check. We label those and never bill for them. What that means, and why roughly 28% of business addresses land there, is set out on our page about catch-all domains.
Once you've mailed a contact, it counts until the period ends
Suppose you upload 100,000 contacts to an Elastic Email marketing plan and send a launch campaign the same afternoon. By evening 9,400 of them have hard bounced and their status has flipped to Invalid. Elastic Email's help center lists Invalid among the statuses that aren't counted toward your plan, so you might expect the billable total to fall to 90,600.
It doesn't, at least not yet. The same article says a contact that received an email before its status changed still counts toward your limit, and that deleting it doesn't help until the next subscription period begins. Every one of those 9,400 was billable the moment you pressed send.
Run the check before the upload, which costs $139 on our 100,000 tier, and the arithmetic changes. Say it finds the same 9,400, plus 6,000 unknowns that you hold back. The launch goes to 84,600 contacts, and nothing dead was ever mailed or counted.
Statuses to understand before the first upload
New contacts arrive as Active by default, which is a statement about consent that you're making on their behalf. Engaged is earned later, when someone opens or clicks within the last six months. Their documentation notes that role-based addresses can be given Inactive status on upload, so don't be alarmed when your info@ and sales@ rows behave differently from the others.
Then there's Stale. It's tied to a setting called Contact Pruning, which moves contacts to Stale once they pass limits you define, and Stale contacts are neither mailed nor counted. Look at how that setting is configured before importing an old list. With pruning on and a strict limit, a good share of a dormant file can go Stale after a campaign or two, which is healthy but surprising if nobody told you it was enabled.
Questions people ask
Is verification worth it at this price point?
Especially at this price point. Our 100,000-address tier is $139, against an account suspension that stops every stream you run at once.
Should I test before a full send?
Yes. A few thousand addresses gives you the bounce rate before the whole list is exposed, and on a strict platform that difference is the account.
What do I do with unknown results here?
Hold them back entirely on a first campaign. On a platform this quick to suspend, unresolved addresses are risk you do not need to take on day one.