This is also known as a “catch-all”. This is a domain-wide setting where all emails on this domain will be described as an “accept all”. There is no reliable way to determine whether this email is valid or invalid.
An accept-all address is usually used in small businesses to ensure a company receives an email that has been sent to them, regardless of typos. Moreover, these are also seen in larger government, medical and educational organizations. Oftentimes these are in fact valid emails. However, some organizations may use this setting as a security feature to restrict unsolicited emails.
SAFE – If you have a dedicated email server with your own IPs, accept all emails that may be reliable for sending dependent on the overall health of your list.
DON’T SEND – If you use a third-party email provider that needs a bounce rate below 4%, these emails are not safe for sending.
The further you know…
The portion of accept-all is directly correlated to the amount of “Invalid” emails within a collection of data. The more the invalid rate, the more likely the accept-alls are to bounce. If you have a reasonably clean list, the accept-all has a better possibility of being “valid” results.
We have seen accept-all tend to bounce at half the rate of your original invalid percentage. So for an instance, if you had 10% invalids within your list, it is possible up to 5% of your accept-alls will still bounce. This is very essential to be notified of when it comes to sending to accept alls.
If your data was not acquired, and you have a pretty good idea where it came from, you should have a less likely problem with bounces rather than data that you are doubtful of or that you purchased.
We can share some safe sending practices when it comes to accept-all result codes.
Sending in small quantities (at your preference) and monitoring which ones bounce back (these will be emails you will need to take out of your data) can help you begin removing invalid emails from your list. Some ESPs will provide a higher amount of accept-alls to be sent at once, but we would recommend contacting the sending platform of your choice to find any additional information. We also suggest using another email account to do some catch-all sending to see which ones bounce back (these will be invalid, and the emails that don’t bounce most likely made it through to their expected destination) this way you will not damage your sending status with your primary email account or sending platform.
