About Clearout
Bulk verification
Quick validation
Verifying email addresses with API
Integrations
Legal and Compliance
About Clearout
1. Getting started with Clearout
Even in today’s era when we have multiple ways to reach out to our customers, email marketing rules the marketing world. One of the major things that impacts the success of an email marketing campaign is the email deliverability and open rate of the emails. Both these things are directly impacted by how you clean an email list.
Clearout is an easy to use email validation and verification tool specially designed for email marketers and email marketing companies to clean the email list. This will help you reduce the bounce rate, avoid a bad impact on your sender reputation and remove fraudulent emails from your email database.
Clearout is an easy to use email validation and verification tool specially designed for email marketers and email marketing companies to clean the email list. This will help you reduce the bounce rate, avoid a bad impact on your sender reputation and remove fraudulent emails from your email database.
Create a Free Clearout Account
Verifying email addresses on Clearout is a simple process. All you need is to Sign Up to create a free account, which gives 100 free verification credits. We offer 5 times more free credits than our top competitors, you can go ahead and compare. Additional credits can be purchased at amazing prices.
You can refer this video about how to create a free account on Clearout - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skOwAPgU6Ew&t
You can refer this video about how to create a free account on Clearout - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skOwAPgU6Ew&t
Bulk Verification
Once you have created your Clearout account and are logged in, you can upload your mailing list for verification. See our Uploading the list and Importing List from ESP pages for more information.
Quick Validation
As the name suggests, with quick validation you can get instant results. Once you have created an account, just go to quick validation, enter the email addresses you want to verify and click on 'Validate'. Maximum 10 email addresses are allowed per validation.
Verifying Email addresses with our API
Clearout's API can be integrated into your web applications to verify email addresses at the point of capture in real-time. Refer to the Verifying email addresses with API, page for more information.
2. Email deliverability Guarantee
Email deliverability is the foundation for a successful email marketing program. If you’re not getting emails delivered, you don’t have a proper email marketing program. We at Clearout understand the importance of email deliverability and that's why we adopt best practices for email verification to offer our customers the best possible accuracy in the industry. We back up our verification results with a 97% deliverability rate guarantee. In other words, when you verify your email addresses with Clearout, we guarantee that the bounce rate will not be more than 3% in case of messages sent to “Guaranteed Deliverable” email addresses or the flag Safe-to-Send set as "Yes".
In order to qualify for our guarantee, the following criterias must be met-
- Email addresses must be classified as the guaranteed deliverable
- The email is sent anytime before 24 hours from the verified time
- Email addresses must have been acquired by the Opt-in process only. Email addresses acquired by purchased or rented lists are not covered under this guarantee.
- Free service providers such as Yahoo, AOL will not be covered
- Bounces resulting from technical issues, sender reputation being poor, recipient server reaching maximum receiving capacity, mail server being improperly configured, server not being available, or the recipient has specifically banned the sender's email identity, delivery blocked due to internal rules, etc. won't qualify for this guarantee.
3. Understanding Clearout Results
Safe to Send
The safe-to-send flag is based on best practices followed in the industry, At times there can be a situation when even a valid email bounces back. There can be multiple reasons for the same, that's why we have introduced the safe to send feature. It provides the below-mentioned 4 values which determine how secure an email address is based on the probability of bounce-back
| Yes | Sending emails to these email addresses is completely safe as long as the email is sent anytime before 24 hours from the verified time. |
| Risky | As the name suggests, a little risk is involved in sending emails to these email addresses but the email addresses of this result file are safe to use when the bounce rate is strictly below 5% or using own email sending platform without depending on external Email Service Provider (ESP). The risk factor depends upon multiple reasons like -High volume of role-based email addresses -Any temporary mail account issue -Mail server configured to accept all email messages |
| No | Invalid email addresses that you should avoid sending emails to. |
| Unknown | Due to unavoidable reasons, the status of the email cannot be determined currently |
Status
The status gives a broad picture of the quality of the email addresses. After successful email verification, every email address is primarily categorized as either Valid, Invalid, Catch-All or Unknown.
| Valid | A valid email address has been verified as a real email that is currently accepting the emails |
| Invalid | An invalid email address has been verified as a bad recipient address that does not exist or is not accepting the emails. Invalid emails will result in a bounce |
| Catch-all | Certain servers accept all the emails for that domain and never bounces it back to the sender, those email addresses are flagged as catchall emails. |
| Unknown | Clearout will return an unknown result when it was unable to get a response from the recipient's mail server. This often happens if the destination mail server is too slow or temporarily unavailable due to an issue with their internal network or expired domain names. In certain cases, retrying your request after some time will return a valid or invalid response. |
Status Reasons
Apart from the email verification results mentioned above, the report generated will contain the status reasons for the given status results. The definition of each status reason is explained below.
| Status Reason | Description | Clearout Status | Bounce Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Success | This email address is valid and safe to send emails. | Valid | |
| Failure | This email address belongs to a mail server that is returning a temporary error | Unknown | |
| Syntax error | This email address is a commonly misspelled popular domain according to RFC standards. | Invalid | Hard |
| Probably Spamtrap/Honeypot | These email addresses are believed to be spamtraps, must avoid sending mails. | Invalid | Soft |
| Mail server connection timeout | Unable to connect to mail server with in stipulated time, recommend to retry some time later | Unknown | |
| Domain not found | This email address is valid in syntax, but the domain doesn't have any records in DNS or have incomplete DNS Records. | Invalid | Hard |
| Not a Mail Server | This email address doesn’t belong to a mail server. | Invalid | Hard |
| Mail server error | This email address belongs to a mail server that is returning a temporary error. | Unknown | |
| Mailbox not found | This email address is valid in syntax but does not exist. | Invalid | Hard |
| Mail server employed greylisting technique; so try after sometime | Domain IP of the specified email address is greylisted, advice to retry some time later | Unknown | |
| Catch-All mail server | Mail server has been configured to receive all messages that are addressed to an incorrect email address for a domain | Catch-All | |
| Unable to determine; retry later after an hour or so | This email address is not responding at the particular moment so you can retry later an hour or so. | Unknown | |
| Mailbox quota exceeded | This email address exceeded the space quota and are not accepting any emails. | Invalid | Soft |
| Retry later after an hour or contact support | The server didnot allow verification of the emails, temporarily. As we do not charge for the unknowns it is always advisible to retry verifying at a later point of time. | Unknown | |
| No Answer Received From Authoritative Server | This email address belongs to a mail server that is not responding at the time of verification. | Unknown | |
| Dns Query Timeout | Unable to resolve DNS with in stipulated time, so retry at a later time increasing the timeout parameter(API verification) | Unknown | |
| Dns Query Unhandled Error | This email address belongs to a mail server that is returning a temporary error. | Unknown | |
| Insufficient System Resource (disk/memory) | This email server exceeded the space quota and are not accepting any emails. | Invalid | Soft |
| Mail server command timeout | Verifying this email address takes a longer time than expected. Please retry at a later time increasing the timeout parameter(API verification) | Unknown |
Associated Results
Here are the other result related terms to help you get a better understanding
| Score | Providing the score is based on multiple factors is a unique feature of Clearout. Each email address is assigned a score value range from 0-1 to indicate the probability of email message getting delivered to that email address. The overall score at list level is an average score of all valid email addresses in percentage form
| |||||||||||||||
| Disposable Email Address | Clearout checks if the email address belongs to a temporary account created for a short period of time, like a few hours to a few days. Generally, disposable emails are created to receive initial account activation or confirmation emails for sites like discussion forums, e-shopping etc. Sending emails to such addresses increases the bounce rate. So it is highly recommended not to send emails to "Disposable Email Addresses". | |||||||||||||||
| Free Email Address | Clearout identifies the email addresses that are using free services such as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. In many cases, it is perfectly acceptable to send email to a user of a free email service. However, in certain contexts, businesses can receive better open/response rates when only sending to non-free email addresses. | |||||||||||||||
| Role Based Email Address | Clearout identifies the email addresses that are typically associated with a role (postmaster, support, sales, etc.) instead of a person. In some instances, mailing to a role address can lead to a decreased open rate and is generally advised against while sending an email | |||||||||||||||
| Greylist Count | Clearout provides the greylist count for every address after the successful email verification to check whether the email address is a honeypot or not. Sending emails to addresses with a higher greylist count will increase the bounce rate so it is highly recommended not to send emails to "Greylisted Email Addresses". | |||||||||||||||
| Auto suggestion | Clearout provides autosuggestion feature which checks in real-time if there is a typo. The autosuggestion will pose an alternative email address when Clearout notices a potentially mistyped address. For instance, if a user types the email address as "[email protected]", Clearout will suggest the corrected spelling [email protected] | |||||||||||||||
| Verification Timestamp | Clearout provides the verified time for every email address to ensure the freshness of your list. | |||||||||||||||
| Verification Time Taken | Clearout provides the response time taken for every email address by a simple open relay check. |
4.Turnaround time
Real-time verification through Clearout API takes less than a second for almost all major free email service providers such as gmail.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com, aol.com. which cover the maximum share of email population. Clearout has optimised the turnaround time even for the business email addresses created out of G-Suite, Microsoft Exchange Servers and Yahoo businesses too.
5. Security and Privacy
We, the Clearout team completely understand the sensitivity and importance of your email data, that's why we give our best to keep your data secure and private. Clearout's service is fully compliant with the GDPR and Clearout will never sell or share the addresses you verify using our system.
Security of your uploaded / imported data
The following measures are taken to protect the data you upload, import or use during quick validation
- List data is transmitted over 256-bit SSL, the same protocol used by financial firms to ensure secure data transmission.
- Your data is never stored in our system for more than 30 days after processing. Once you finish using our system, all information related to your account will be erased in a maximum of 30 days. You may also delete your results any time before the 30-days as an added precaution.
- We have also developed advanced defense mechanisms against misuse, loss, unauthorized access, and improper disclosure of your data.
Security of API Data
Email addresses verified using Clearout API are protected during transmission using 256-bit SSL. In addition to data encryption in transit and at rest, we process the data under the rules of our privacy policy with an access control mechanism. We do not entertain user data for any purpose other than validation.
For further detailed information, you can refer to our privacy policy
For further detailed information, you can refer to our privacy policy
Bulk verification
1. Supported file format
The bulk email verification or list cleaning supports Comma Separated values (.csv) and text-only spreadsheet (.xlsx). You can upload a simple list of emails or emails along with its associated information like name, city, etc.
2. Uploading the list
A. To ensure Clearout can successfully verify your file, it should meet the following criteria:
- The list should be in the supported formats
- List should contain one (and only one) email address in each row.
- Ensure email addresses are present or explicitly specified in a header row with one of the column value either as "Email" or "Emails" or "Email address" or "Emailaddress"
- Email addresses should appear in the same column in each row.
B. To upload your list follow these steps
- Login to your Clearout account
- Click on the 'Add list'.
- Browse or drag and drop the file you want to verify.
- Once your file has been uploaded it will be visible in the 'My lists' section. If any file has been wrongly uploaded, you may delete it BEFORE verification.
- Click on 'verify' to begin the verification process.
C. You may filter the uploaded lists on the following basis-
| Status | It involves two categories,the verified lists and the non-verified lists. |
| Created on | This filter can be done on the basis of the date on which the the list has been uploaded. It can be day-wise, month-wise and even on a yearly basis. |
| Source | It involves the source from which the list has been uploaded, From your data, ESP or the lead finder. |
| In progress | As the name suggests, this filter applies to the lists that are under the process of verification. |
3. Downloading Verified Lists
After successful verification of the email list, a detailed report about the quality and existence of each email is generated. Clearout generates 5 specially designed email verification reports which you can generate at your convenience.
| Guaranteed Deliverables | The result will only include the email addresses that are guaranteed to be delivered to the mailbox of the recipient, i.e. no bounce back. Sending emails to these email addresses is completely safe as long as the email is sent anytime before 24 hours from the verified time. The downloaded result will also contain Clearout standard columns appended to the original columns. Duplicates, if any, will be included in the report but will not be billable. |
| Deliverables with risk | The result will include Guaranteed Deliverables (mentioned above) and the email addresses that are determined risky. The risk factor depends upon multiple reasons like Low deliverability, high volume of role-based email addresses, temporary mail account issue, mail server configured to acept all email messages etc.Duplicates, if any, will be included in the report but will not be billable. |
| Non-deliverables | The result will include the email addresses that will certainly bounce, so it is highly recommended not to send any emails to such addresses and unsubscribe them from the mailing list. Duplicates, if any, will be included in the report but will not be billable. |
| Email Addresses with Clearout standard columns | The result file will include all verified status email addresses – Valid, Invalid, Catch All, Unknown appended to other Clearout columns. Duplicates, if any, will not be included in the result file. Your original file columns will not be included in the result file. |
| Custom | The result file will include your original list together with the columns you choose further- Valid, Invalid, Catch All and Unknown. Select columns that you want to include in your list by clicking on the required checkbox. Duplicates, if any, will be included in the report but will not be billable. |
Once you select the type of report you want to generate, click on the 'Download result' button present.
You are allowed to download the result more than once but the result will automatically expire within a period of 30 days from the time of verification and will be shown as 'result expired'
You are allowed to download the result more than once but the result will automatically expire within a period of 30 days from the time of verification and will be shown as 'result expired'
4. Importing List from ESP
If you use an Email Service Provider (ESP) like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Moosend, Hubspot with Clearout you can import your mailing lists for verification.
- Once you log-in to your Clearout account, firstly you need to integrate your ESP account with the Clearout account. You may Add more than one ESP account, for example, you can add more than one Mailchimp account and select the account in which the email list needs to be verified.
You may refer to the following pages for step-wise integration process
- Once your ESP account has been integrated navigate to 'Add List'
- Select the ESP from which you want to import the list
- Once you click on the required ESP, your existing lists in that ESP will be visible. You can go ahead and select the list(s) you want to verify by simply clicking on the checkbox and clicking on 'Add to My Lists'
- Once the list is added you can go ahead and verify it by clicking on the 'verify' button.
5. Exporting list to ESP
Once the verification of an ESP imported list is done, you may either download the result or simply export it to the relevant account. Accordingly, you may click on either of the two 'Download result' or 'Export'
In the case of exporting the result, a clearout user has the option to choose how they want to export the list(s), to their ESP account.
In the case of exporting the result, a clearout user has the option to choose how they want to export the list(s), to their ESP account.
A. Unsubscibe
Selecting this check-box will unsubscribe all the non-deliverables from your list
NOTE: When updating an ESP list, be sure to export only once. If you have any questions at all about what email addresses will be unsubscribed, please contact our support team.
NOTE: When updating an ESP list, be sure to export only once. If you have any questions at all about what email addresses will be unsubscribed, please contact our support team.
B. Append
All columns selected for append will be appended with 'Clearout Verification' in the result file. You can tick the checkbox which you want to include in the file to be exported.
NOTE: Both 'unsubscribe' and 'append' can also be selected
NOTE: Both 'unsubscribe' and 'append' can also be selected
6. List Verification Analysis
Clearout understands how valuable time is for a user, therefore we provide a brief yet important analysis of each bulk verification list that has undergone the verification process. This analysis provides a quick insight of the overall email verification result even before you download the actual detailed result.
The information it provides
- Percentage of the 'Valid' , 'Invalid' , 'Catch-all' , and 'Unknown' emails
- Pie chart for total counts of 'Valid' , 'Invalid' , 'Catch-all' , and 'Unknown' emails
- Total counts for 'Duplicate', 'Syntax Error', 'Disposable', 'FreeAccount' and 'Role Accounts'
On the left you will have brief of
- The name of the list
- The date of creation and the date of verification
- Time is taken for verification
- Total number of Emails in the list
- Billable emails, i.e. the emails for the verification of which your credits have been used. The credits are not used for Duplicate and unknown emails.
Quick validation
What is Quick validation?
Ever needed an immediate validation of any email address, when uploading, adding and then downloading seems a long procedure? For such cases, Clearout has an exclusive of Quick Validation. Just provide an email address in quick validation (you may even copy and paste it) Click on validate, and within a fraction of seconds get the result.
Is there any kind of limit on Quick Validation?
Currently, a maximum of 10 email addresses is allowed per validation. Just enter the email address (or copy and paste maximum 10email addresses), press enter and then enter the next email address before clicking on 'Validate'
The result of Quick Validation
Quick Validation will provide all relevant results required for quick decision making. The result will include 'safe to send', 'status', 'Role account', 'Free account' and 'Disposable Account'
Verifying email addresses with API
A brief of why API key is essential
Clearout Email Validation API makes it easy to validate any email address. Our verification API, within a fraction of second, allows you to create Custom Integrations to add email verification to any part of your software application. The verification API can be called anywhere during the email capture process to know whether to accept or reject the given email address, which means only valid users will enter your database.
Refer this link for a complete understanding of Clearout API - https://docs.clearout.io/api-overview.html
Note : Stay up-to date with always using the latest version
Benefits of verifying emails in real-time
| Managing your campaign cost | Eliminate incorrect, bad and unreachable contacts and be assured you are spending resources to target the best audience of your campaign that ultimately benefits your campaign costs and gains a high return on investment. |
| Higher Open Rates | With strong sender reputation and high deliverability, you are earning high open rates and better response rates. |
| Protect your sender reputation | Preventing bad emails to enter into your database at the first place, will reduce future hard bounces and gain you a best deliverability. |
| Better Business Performance | High open rates and better response rates from your contacts and prospects creates better business opportunities and helps you to achieve your business goals. |
Use cases for real time verification using API
The following are a few typical use cases that describe a situation where Clearout can help you enhance your motive.
| Registration forms | Often users makes mistakes when they enter email addresses for registrations. Verifying such emails instantly using Clearout API allows your users to fix their errors and enter a correct email. Also, you can reject registration for invalid or disposable email addresses. |
| Subscription forms | If you have a form on your blogs or sites where user can subscribe for your newsletters, event notifications or product launch emails, integrate Clearout API to accept only valid emails. |
Settings
1. Team Account
Successful marketing highly depends on a team effort. Therefore, Clearout provides you the facility to upgrade your account to a team to let and sub-let the account access amongst multiple users.
Creating a Team Account
- Login to your account> Go to Settings> Click on 'Upgrade' on the top left
- A pop-up will open in which you need to enter
| 2 | Organisation Website URL | Enter organisation Website URL for which you would like to use the Team Account |
| 3 | Enter Phone Number | Enter the phone number through which you would like to use the Team Account |
- Click on 'Submit'
- Once submitted, you need to Login your account again.
- Enter 'Settings' again. Now in the top left corner , you will have an additional option of 'Admin'
- You can add members and provide them a specific role as desired and assign them the number of credits you wish.
Different roles in a Team Account
There are 3 different roles based on which the teams can be created
Benefits of Team Account
- Share credits
- Invite members to be part of a team
- Grant different access and permissions
- Access the stored lists of team members
- Monitor the account and data usage
Have any doubts? Don't keep it in your mind ask us via chat or mail us @ [email protected]
2. Notifications
With loads of things going in everyone's life, keeping a track of important things becomes tough at times.
Clearout ensures to notify you about the following via email
Clearout ensures to notify you about the following via email
- Notification when the list verification completes
- Notification when the list export completes
- Notification when the list verification result is about to expire
- Notification of low credits remaining. You can get the notification of low credits on the desired Email Address and can even specify the limit of low credits
Note: These notifications are automatically set on an 'on' mode. You can switch it off anytime by turning it off in the 'settings' of your account.
Integrations
We work with all of your favorite applications be it ESPs, CRMs, WordPress, Zapier, Google Sheets, and a lot more upcoming apps to bring seamless experience for you to clean the lists and to help you save more hours every day for other productive work.
Legal and Compliance
Our various policy documents are available below. If you're looking for something not listed here, or have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]
Support
Still, need help? Feel free to contact us any time, we will be honored to help you
You can contact us in any way you find convenient
You can contact us in any way you find convenient
- 24*7 Chat Available
Require an instant answer? Contact us through LIVE chat
- Mail us at [email protected]
Mail us in case of any query and we will answer you within 24 Hours
- Join our community
Clearout community has multiple categories which can let you have healthy discussions via announcements, discussions, Q&A and tips and suggestions too