User guide
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 HubSpot that automatically verifies whether or not a contact's email address is valid, and flags it in HubSpot if it's invalid, so you don't email it.
- Note
- Call
- Phone
- LinkedIn DMs
- More
- atara.s@mce-sys.com
- Phone number
- +1 (646) 555-0142Mobile
- Email status
- Valid
We booked 41 meetings last month without adding headcount. The trick was boring: call the warm ones first, and log every touch back to the CRM the moment it happens.
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 or your HubSpot account 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 contact 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.
- ValidThe mailbox exists. Safe to send.
- InvalidDoes not exist. boring looks for a valid one.
- QuestionableCatch-all or unverifiable domain.
- No statusNot checked yet.
Invalid emails in HubSpot
When an email is found to be invalid, boring sets the contact's Email status to Invalid, and, if your admin picked one, sets the lead status your team uses for invalid emails. Your HubSpot workflows can use these to take the contact out of email sequences and lists, while your team keeps working them through calls and LinkedIn tasks.
When does boring verify an email address?
Boring automatically verifies a contact's email address in the following 3 scenarios, any time they occur:
- When the contact is created in HubSpot. This happens however the contact is created: manually, through a form or an integration, or by an import.
- When an existing contact is enrolled in a sequence.
- When an existing contact's email is changed.
How long does it take for boring to verify an email address?
Boring is pretty speedy. Most emails are verified within a few seconds. All users in your HubSpot account share the same verification queue, so if a bunch of contacts are added at once it could take a little longer 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 and when boring verified a contact's email address?
There are 2 places where you'll see boring leave its mark inside of HubSpot every time an email is verified.
- The email status dot. With boring's Chrome extension, every contact record shows a dot after the email address: green for Valid, red for Invalid, yellow for Questionable and grey for No status.Atara SaltzmanExecutive Assistant at MCEatara.s@mce-sys.comlinkedin.com/in/atara-saltzman
- Note
- Call
- Phone
- LinkedIn DMs
- More
atara.s@mce-sys.com+1 (646) 555-0142About this contact- atara.s@mce-sys.com
- Phone number
- +1 (646) 555-0142Mobile
- Email status
- Valid
- Contact properties. In the contact's "About this contact" panel you'll find the 2 properties boring fills in, the ones your admin picked in boring's settings: Email status, and Email verification date.Atara SaltzmanExecutive Assistant at MCEatara.s@mce-sys.comlinkedin.com/in/atara-saltzman
- Note
- Call
- Phone
- LinkedIn DMs
- More
atara.s@mce-sys.com+1 (646) 555-0142About this contact- atara.s@mce-sys.com
- Phone number
- +1 (646) 555-0142Mobile
- Email status
- Valid
Troubleshooting
Email not getting verified?