MarketingOperations

List Cleaning

Remove invalid and dead addresses before outbound campaigns to keep open rates honest and costs down.

Email validity · 1 credit per lookup · no monthly fee

jules@stripe.com
old@defunct.io
ana@vercel.com
1 removed · 2 kept

The problem

Email lists rot at roughly 25% a year, people change jobs, abandon inboxes, and companies fold. Send to a stale list and your bounce rate spikes, mailbox providers start routing you to spam, and your open rates become fiction built on dead addresses.

With Encrata

Run the list through validity checks before the campaign, not after the damage. At 1 credit per address, screening a 50k list costs less than the deliverability consultant you'd need afterwards. Dead and disposable addresses come back clearly labeled, so what remains is a list where every send has a real mailbox behind it.

How it works

1

Send the address

Call the validity endpoint with the email address at the moment it enters your system, a form, an import, a checkout.

2

We ask the mail server

Encrata checks syntax, domain and mailbox directly with the receiving server, and flags disposable and typo domains.

3

Act on the verdict

Accept, reject or suggest a correction based on a clear valid / invalid / catch-all / risky verdict. One credit per check.

One call, structured answer

List Cleaning runs on the email validity lookup at 1 credit per lookup. Same API key, same JSON shape as every other Encrata lookup.

  • Answers come from the mail server itself, not a guess from patterns
  • Disposable and throwaway domains are flagged before they cost you anything
  • 1 credit per check, cheap enough to run on every address you touch
  • Cached results are free, so repeated checks never double-charge
Terminal
curl -X POST "https://encrata.com/api/agent/validate" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"email": "sara@acme.com"}'
response.json
{
"email": "sara@acme.com",
"status": "valid",
"reason": "deliverable",
"disposable": false,
"confidence": "high",
"provider": "google",
"message": "Mailbox exists and accepts mail, safe to send.",
"credits": 1
}

Sweep the list before every send

The standard pattern is a pre-send sweep: export the segment, run it through validity checks (the bulk job endpoint handles up to a million addresses per job), and suppress everything that comes back invalid or disposable. Teams on a regular cadence keep a suppression list keyed by address so re-checks within the billing window cost nothing.

Metrics you can finally trust

Expect 5–20% of any list older than a year to fall out, that's normal decay, not a data disaster. What matters is what happens after: campaigns to the cleaned list see honest open rates, mailbox providers stop throttling you, and the metrics your team reports finally describe real people. Re-clean quarterly and the list never degrades far enough to hurt again.

More email validity use cases

View all
Start with 500 free credits
$curl https://encrata.com/api/agent/lookup -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" -d '{"e": "satya@microsoft.com"}'