A CRM full of dead addresses costs more than a dirty mailing list
A rep has complained that half their sequence bounced, or reporting shows a pipeline built on contacts nobody can reach. In a CRM a dead address costs more than an undeliverable does: it is a deal with no route to the buyer.
Your CRM records are also older than a mailing list's. A CRM accumulates contacts over years and nobody deletes anything, so it holds the largest concentration of stale business addresses in most companies.
The order the work happens in
Deduplicate before you check anything
The same person exists three times, from three imports. Merging first stops you paying to verify one mailbox repeatedly and stops three conflicting results landing on three records.
Verify by record age and last activity
A contact you touched last week doesn't need checking. One untouched for two years is where the decay is, and that ordering makes the job affordable on a large database.
Write the result to a field, never over the address
Overwrite or delete contact data in a CRM and you lose history and break reports. A status field with the date preserves both and is reversible.
Create tasks for the accounts that matter
An invalid address on an open opportunity is a sales action, not a data problem. It usually means the person changed jobs, and that is worth a call.
Check what the integrations will do
A CRM syncs to the sending platform, the ad audiences and the support tool. Work out where a status field propagates before you write it to fifty thousand records.
What each result means here
The same four results and their flags, read against this job. A catch-all worth keeping in one situation is one to exclude in another.
| Result | What to do with it |
|---|---|
| Valid | Stamp the field with the date. A verification is evidence with an expiry, not a permanent property. |
| Invalid | Flag the record and stop it syncing to sending tools. On an open deal, assign it to the owner as a task. |
| Catch-all | Flag as unconfirmed. Common at larger companies, so a large share of your best accounts land here and deleting them would be an expensive mistake. |
| Unknown | Leave the record alone and re-check on the next pass. Corporate mail gateways refuse probes routinely. |
| Role flag | Keep. In a CRM a role address is frequently the correct route into a small company. |
| Disposable flag | Investigate rather than delete. A throwaway address on a CRM contact usually means the record came from a lead form worth reviewing. |
How you know it is finished
Every contact has a status and a date, the sync to your sending tools excludes the failures, and the open opportunities with unreachable buyers are sitting in somebody's task list.
What this does not fix
A 100,000-contact database is $139 of credits, though checking by age and last activity usually cuts that considerably. Duplicates are not billed, which on a CRM export matters more than it does on a mailing list.
Questions people ask
Should I delete invalid contacts from the CRM?
No. Flag them and stop the sync to your sending tools. Deleting destroys the account history and guarantees somebody re-imports the same record from an old file next quarter.
How often does CRM email data go stale?
Business contact data decays at roughly 22 to 30% a year, driven mostly by job changes. That is the rate for the database as a whole, and the untouched records carry most of it.
Does a valid result mean the person still works there?
No. Plenty of companies keep an address accepting mail after someone leaves, sometimes forwarding it to a colleague. The SMTP check confirms a mailbox, not an employment status.
Try it on the file in front of you
100 free checks a month, no card. Addresses we could not get an answer on come back labeled as unknown, and those are not billed.