What is the recommended procedure for dealing with Accept All email addresses?
Accept All email addresses are the Achilles heel of email verification. In short, it means that we're not able to fully verify the validity of the email address, because all email addresses are valid according to the domain's mail servers.
There's no right or wrong approach to dealing with these, but there are some questions you can ask to help you better decide if you should use them or not.
Were these email addresses obtained via opt-in, legitimately to your email lists?
If yes, it's probably safe to send to them.
Were these email addresses bought or scraped?
First, if this is in a B2C context and these were bought or scraped, stop and delete these email addresses right away. This is always a bad idea and likely illegal depending on your jurisdiction.
If this is a B2B context, depending on your jurisdiction, this may or may not be legal, too. So always be aware of that and consult the appropriate legal entities.
Second, if this is B2B and you want to put them into an email marketing campaign, we recommend you do not do this. You risk harming your reputation as well as getting banned from your email service provider and blacklisted from email providers should your bounce rates increase significantly.
If you want to email them, you could target them with ads to an offer such as a lead magnet and have them explicitly opt-in to receive email marketing materials from you.
If you insist on emailing them, you will want to test in small batches, and use software that is not your email service provider since this is likely against their terms of service. You could look into some cold email tools, instead.
Have you ever emailed these email addresses before?
If yes, and they have responded or engaged, then it's probably safe to send to them.
In addition, observe the patterns of the companies involved. If the pattern of most of the email addresses is [email protected], then [email protected] might be good, whereas [email protected] likely is not.
