Email Verification Guide

Background

This guide covers how boring's email verification feature works, and how to determine if and when an email has been verified.

It will also lay out a few useful workflows for dealing with invalid emails.

How it works

Boring's email verification plugin is an add-on to Outreach that automatically verifies whether or not a prospect's email address is valid, and prevents you from sending them an email if it's invalid.

What's an invalid email?

An invalid email address is an email address that doesn't belong to anybody at the company you're trying to email.

As a general rule, invalid email addresses will bounce back if you try to send to them.

However, This isn't always the case. There are many companies that choose to not send bounce back messages to people who email invalid addresses at their domain in order to prevent people sending cold emails from being able to try to guess people's email addresses by sending it and seeing if it delivered or not.

Because of these two realities, simply sending an email and seeing if it bounces or delivers and gets opened isn't a reliable way to verify if an email address truly belongs to someone and can receive mail.

Key takeaway: Invalid emails often don't bounce. They often even show up as "opened".

How does boring verify emails?

Boring uses something called SMTP ping technology to determine whether an email address is valid or not.

Instead of sending an email, it uses the Standard Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to send the recipient's email server a message (ping) asking if the specific address in question exists at that domain. This pinging does not involve your email servers at all. It's purely between boring's servers and the recipient email server.

This is the only truly reliable way to verify an email.

Verification results

Boring will mark an email with one of three possible statuses:

• Valid - these emails are valid and safe to send.
• Invalid - these emails are invalid. They won't be delivered to your prospect if you send them.
• Questionable - this is a small percentage of email domains that boring isn't able to verify one way or the other. It doesn't mean that the email is no good. It just means that our email verification methods weren't successful on this specific domain. You'll typically see this status applied to an entire company at a time (any email at that company's specific email domain) since this is usually a domain wide issue. Our personal recommendation is to send emails to addresses that are questionable because this status doesn't at all indicate that the email is incorrect. It simply means this type of email can't really be verified.

Email opt-out

When an email is found to be invalid, your admin may enable an automated workflow to opt the prospect out of email communication. The workflow allows users to still add prospects to sequences and execute non-email tasks as usual, but automatically skip and email tasks in the sequence. It also makes it impossible to send an email to this address from Outreach, which avoids any possibility of emailing an invalid address.

When does boring verify an email address?

Boring automatically verifies a prospect's email address in the following 3 scenarios, any time they occur, in perpetuity:

1. When the prospect is created in Outreach for the first time. Note that this happens through any creation type - whether you manually create the prospect like in the example below, as well as when a prospect is created in Outreach through any external integration (CRM, prospecting chrome extension, or CSV upload).
2. When an existing prospect is added to a sequence.
3. When an existing prospect's email is changed.

How long does it take for boring to verify an email address?

Boring is pretty speedy. It can verify 200 emails per second in your Outreach account. It's important to keep in mind that all users share the same verification queue so if a bunch of people are adding prospects it could take a few seconds for any given email to get verified.

Some domains may also in general take longer to verify. We've seen it take up to a minute to get a result but it happens pretty infrequently.

How can I tell if an when boring verified a prospect's email address?

There are 3 places where you'll see boring leave it's mark inside of Outreach every time any email is verified.

1. The email status indicator. This is the dot on every prospects profile next to any of their email addresses. By default this dot is set to the color grey which represents "No status". Once boring verifies an email address it'll update the status indicator to reflect the emails true status.

   EnrichEdit

   IB

   Ian Bolton

   Etera • VP Sales

   Connect

   Contact

   • ian@etera.ioValid
   • +1 (512) 555-0187Verizon
   • LinkedInNot connected
   • US, TexasAustin(GMT-05:00) Central Daylight Time - Chicago
   • 10:42 AM

2. Prospect custom fields. On every prospects profile on the far right hand side of the page you can navigate to their custom fields by scrolling to the bottom of that panel. There you will the 2 custom fields related to boring that your admin configured - Email status, and Email verification date.

   Custom fields

   Email status:

   Valid

   Email verification date:

   January 28, 2025 at 11:46 AM GMT+2

3. Prospect activity logs. Every time boring updates a custom field, email status, or email opt out state, it leaves an audit trial on the prospect activity log so you can see when boring is doing its thing. The person taking the action will always be your admin who installed boring initially, since the plugin uses their Outreach user to set the statuses and custom fields. It'll look something like this:

Note that the user in this example (You) will be the name of whoever set up the integration.

In addition to updating these 3 places in Outreach, in the case where an email address is found to be invalid, your admin can enable a workflow to opt that prospect out of email communication in order to automatically prevent any emails from being sent to that address. If you have this workflow enabled, in addition to the email status being marked as invalid, you'll also see the email opt-out banner.

Note that you can always tell when boring opted someone out due to their email being invalid as opposed to when a prospect themselves unsubscribes from email by checking 1) to see if the email status indicator is red (marked invalid) and 2) by looking at the opt-out action in the activity log. When boring is the one opting the prospect out it'll always say "You (or whoever installed the plugin initially) opted out Prospect of email". When a prospect unsubscribes from email it'll say "Prospect Atara Saltzman opted out Atara Saltzman of email"

Video Demo

Here's a full demo of how boring's email verification plugin works, and how to set it up.

Troubleshooting

Email not getting verified?