Real-time email verification
Every address checked in real time, not looked up in a list
When you enrich a prospect, ReachNow opens an SMTP conversation with the company's own mail server and asks about that specific address — then. Addresses that fail never reach you as verified, and the ones that cannot be confirmed either way are labelled as such rather than quietly counted as wins.
5 free credits on signup · No card required
Alex Fournier
Head of Operations · Northwind Systems
- Company domain
- northwind-systems.example
- Industry
- Logistics & Supply Chain
- Headcount
- 201–500
Bounces cost more than the wasted send
- Mailbox providers read a high bounce rate as a signal that you do not know who you are writing to, and they act on it.
- The damage is not limited to the campaign that caused it — deliverability for your entire domain drops, including mail your colleagues send.
- Recovering a damaged sending reputation takes weeks of careful low-volume sending. It is far slower to fix than to cause.
- Tools that serve addresses from a stored database cannot tell you whether an address still works today, only that it worked when it was collected.
- A single accuracy percentage tells you nothing about the specific address in front of you.
The question worth answering is not "what percentage of your data is accurate?" It is "was this specific address checked, and what exactly did the check find?" That is the question ReachNow is built to answer.
A live SMTP conversation, run when you ask
Verification starts from the company's mail domain. ReachNow identifies which server handles mail for that domain, opens the same SMTP conversation a sending mail server would, and asks whether it will accept mail for a given address — then stops, deliberately, before any message is delivered.
The timing is the point. This check runs at the moment you enrich the prospect, so the answer describes the mailbox as it is configured then. Unlike approaches that read an address out of a store of previously collected results, there is no gap between when the address was last confirmed and when you are being told about it.
Nothing is ever sent to the person. The prospect receives no email, no notification and no trace of the check. What ReachNow keeps is the server's answer.
That answer is not always a clean yes or no, and this is where most tools quietly round in their own favour. Some domains accept mail addressed to anything at all, which means acceptance proves the domain works, not that the person exists. ReachNow labels those as risky and tells you why, rather than counting them as confirmed.
- Candidate addresses are built from the company domain and the person's name
- Each candidate is tested individually against the live mail server, by SMTP
- The check runs at enrichment time — not read from a pre-collected directory
- No email is ever delivered to the prospect
- Catch-all domains are labelled risky, never reported as confirmed
- Rejected candidates are returned alongside accepted ones so you can see the work
Process
How a verification runs
STEP 01
Identify the mail domain
ReachNow resolves the prospect's employer to the domain that handles its email, which is not always the same as the domain on its website.
STEP 02
Construct candidate addresses
Using the person's name and that domain, ReachNow generates the address formats businesses commonly use — first.last, flast, firstl and others — as a set of candidates to test.
STEP 03
Ask the mail server
Each candidate is put to the server handling mail for that domain, using the same handshake a sending server performs, stopping short of delivery. The server's response decides the outcome.
STEP 04
Classify and return
Accepted addresses come back as verified. Rejected ones are listed as tested and rejected. Anything inconclusive is labelled rather than guessed at.
A credit is spent only if a verified address is found
Benefits
Why this approach is worth the wait
Checked at the moment you ask
The result reflects the mail server's state now, not whenever a database last happened to be refreshed.
Ambiguity is labelled, not hidden
Catch-all domains and non-responsive servers are reported as what they are. You decide how much risk to accept.
You see the rejections
Candidates that failed are returned with the result. It is the simplest evidence that an address was tested rather than guessed.
Nothing reaches the prospect
Verification is a handshake, not a send. The person is never contacted as part of the check.
Repeat work is not repeated
Verification already done for a company domain is reused across prospects at that company, which makes list runs faster and cheaper.
Failures cost nothing
If verification cannot produce a deliverable address, no credit is deducted for that profile.
The honest limits of any email verification
- A catch-all domain cannot be resolved to an individual by any verification method. We label it; nobody can do better.
- Some mail servers deliberately refuse verification attempts, using greylisting or firewalls. Those come back unknown.
- Verification confirms an address accepts mail. It cannot confirm the person still works there, or that they read it.
- Nothing here prevents a mailbox from being closed the day after you check it.
- We publish no accuracy percentage, because it would depend entirely on which prospects you enrich and you would have no way to check it.
Any vendor quoting a single accuracy figure across all data is describing an average of their own dataset, not a prediction about yours.
Try it against a list of your own
The fastest way to judge enrichment quality is to run it on prospects you already know something about. Sign up, enrich a handful, and check the results yourself.
5 free credits on signup · No card required · Credits are only spent on enriched profiles