How does email verification work?

ReachNow derives the company's mail domain, generates the common business email patterns for that person's name, and then tests the candidates against the domain's actual mail server using an SMTP conversation — the same handshake a sending mail server performs, stopping short of delivering a message. The server's response is what decides the outcome; no email is ever sent to the person. Only addresses that pass are returned to you as verified.

What happens when no verified email is found?

The profile finishes with no verified email attached and no credit is consumed. This happens most often when the profile lists no employer, when the employer has no identifiable mail domain, or when the mail server refuses to answer verification attempts at all. You are told which profiles came back empty so you can decide what to do with them.

How accurate is the result?

ReachNow publishes no accuracy percentage, because a single figure would depend entirely on which prospects you enrich and could not be verified by you. What it does instead is tell you exactly what each result is: an address is only returned as verified when the receiving mail server accepted it, catch-all domains are labelled as risky rather than presented as confirmed, and rejected candidates are shown alongside the accepted ones.

Can I enrich prospects in bulk?

Yes. You can queue profiles and enrich them in a single batch, or upload a CSV of up to 100 profile URLs per file and enrich the whole file at once. You can also schedule enrichment to run automatically on a daily or weekly basis, or when your queue reaches a size you choose, with a credit ceiling per run so a scheduled run cannot overspend.

Can I upload a CSV file?

Yes. Upload a CSV containing profile URLs — up to 100 rows per file, with up to 3 files held at a time — and start enrichment when you are ready. Progress is tracked per row, rows that could not be resolved are listed with the reason, and you can retry just the incomplete rows without re-running the whole file. Completed files download as a CSV with the enriched columns added.

How long does enrichment take?

A single profile typically resolves in under a minute, and the dashboard shows live status while it runs. Batches and CSV files are processed in parallel, so a file finishes considerably faster than the sum of its rows. Exact timing depends on how quickly the receiving mail servers respond, which is outside our control.

Does ReachNow have an API?

Not at present. ReachNow is used through the dashboard, the CSV import and export flow, and the browser extension. If a programmatic integration is a requirement for your team, write to support@reachnow.io and tell us what you need it to do.

How it works

What actually happens when you enrich a prospect

No black box. This page walks through the whole process — how a profile becomes a record, how an address gets tested, what each result means, and where the method runs out of road.

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5 free credits on signup · No card required

The process

Four steps, start to finish

STEP 01
Add the prospects you want to reach
Add prospects individually to your queue, upload a CSV, or save prospect information to ReachNow with the browser extension while you work. All three routes end in the same queue, and adding costs nothing — you can build a list before you own a single credit.
STEP 02
ReachNow resolves each prospect
ReachNow uses the information you provided to match and enrich the prospect record, returning the person as structured fields: name, current role, employer, and the company's domain, industry and headcount where those are published. The mail domain matters most, because it is what an email address can be built from.
STEP 03
Candidate addresses are verified
Using the domain and the person's name, ReachNow constructs the business address formats that company is likely to use, then tests each against the server that handles its mail. Nothing is delivered to the prospect. Only accepted addresses come back as verified.
1 credit — charged only if a verified address results
STEP 04
Export and use the result
Review the records in your dashboard and export as CSV — a full export, or a column layout matching a Salesforce or HubSpot import. Exporting is free, and re-looking up anything already enriched costs nothing.

Step one, in detail

Three ways to add prospects

All three feed the same queue. None of them is required — pick whichever suits how you work.

Paste into the dashboard

Add one or many prospects straight into your queue, including a professional profile URL where you have one. Nothing to install, and the quickest way to try it on a handful of prospects.

Upload a CSV

A file of profile URLs, up to 100 rows each, with 3 files stored at a time. This is how most volume work is done.

Learn more

Save prospects while you work

The browser extension saves prospect information to your queue without manual copy and paste. Entirely optional — it does nothing the dashboard cannot.

Step three, in detail

How an address gets tested

Every email domain has a server that receives its mail. ReachNow finds that server, opens the same conversation a sending mail server would open, and asks whether it will accept mail for a particular address.

Then it stops. The exchange is deliberately abandoned before any message is delivered, so the prospect receives nothing — no email, no notification, no trace of the check. What we keep is the server's answer.

Candidate addresses are constructed from the company's domain and the person's name, using the formats businesses commonly adopt. Each candidate is tested individually. The ones that fail are returned to you as rejected rather than hidden, which is the simplest evidence that an address was tested rather than guessed at.

Find the server that handles mail for the company domain
Build the plausible address formats for that person
Ask the server about each candidate, one at a time
Return what passed, what failed, and what was inconclusive

Enriched contact

Alex Fournier

Head of Operations · Northwind Systems

Company domain: northwind-systems.example
Industry: Logistics & Supply Chain
Headcount: 201–500

a.fournier@northwind-systems.exampleSafe

afournier@northwind-systems.exampleRejected

Illustration of the ReachNow interface. Example data.

Results

What each outcome means

Including the two that are not a clean yes or no. Those are where most tools quietly round in their own favour.

Safe

The mail server confirmed the address exists and accepts mail.

Risky

The domain accepts mail for any address (a catch-all), so existence could not be confirmed individually.

Invalid

The mail server rejected the address. It is not returned to you as verified.

Unknown

The server gave no definitive answer — usually greylisting or a firewall. Treated as unresolved.

Why there is no accuracy percentage on this site

A single accuracy figure is an average over whichever dataset the vendor measured. It tells you nothing about your prospects, and you have no way to check it. We used to publish one. It was not based on anything, so it is gone.

What replaces it is per-result honesty: an address is returned as verified only when the receiving server accepted it, catch-all domains are labelled rather than counted as wins, and the candidates that failed come back alongside the ones that passed.

Output

What comes back

The full field list — the same columns you get in a CSV export.

Fields returned for each enriched prospect
Field	Notes
First and last name	Resolved from the profile
Job title	Current role as listed on the profile
Company name	Current employer
Company domain	The web domain used to build email candidates
Company industry	Where the company publishes it
Company headcount	Where the company publishes it
Verified business email	Addresses that passed verification
Invalid candidates	Addresses that were tested and rejected

When enrichment does not produce a result

Some prospects cannot be resolved, and it is better to know the reasons in advance than to discover them in a job report. None of these cost you a credit.

The profile lists no current employer, so there is no company domain to build an address from.
The employer has no identifiable mail domain — common with very small companies and some holding structures.
The receiving mail server refuses verification attempts entirely, using greylisting or a firewall.
The domain accepts mail for any address, so no individual address can be confirmed. This comes back labelled risky rather than verified.
The person has asked to be removed from our systems, in which case they are suppressed and never returned.

In every one of these cases the profile finishes unresolved and no credit is deducted. You are told which prospects came back empty, so you can decide what to do with them — see how credits work.

FAQ

Questions about the process

Not answered here? Email support or read how ReachNow works.

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.

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5 free credits on signup · No card required · Credits are only spent on enriched profiles