How to verify and clean a scraped email list before sending

Step 1: dedupe by domain, not by email

Multi-location businesses share one inbox. If a chain has eleven branches in your city, you scraped eleven rows and one email address — sending eleven times is how you become a joke in someone's group chat.

Dedupe on the bare domain column first, keep the row with the highest review count as your primary, and stash the others as “other locations” context you can reference in the email. Then dedupe on phone, which catches franchises using different domains from the same office.

Step 2: filter before you verify

1. 1

   Drop the obviously wrong addresses

   Anything at a platform domain the business doesn't own — wixsite, squarespace previews, godaddysites — plus support@ addresses belonging to their website builder rather than them.

2. 2

   Decide about role addresses

   info@, contact@, hello@ and office@ are what local businesses publish. They're legitimate and they're read, usually by whoever handles the front desk. Keep them; just write for that reader rather than for a founder.

3. 3

   Cut rows outside your actual ICP

   Category noise is real — a “dentist” search picks up dental labs and supply shops. Scan the category column and remove what doesn't fit before paying to verify it.

4. 4

   Set aside the no-email rows

   They're not waste. Every one still has a phone number and address, which makes them a call or direct-mail segment. The cold-calling guide covers working that list.

Step 3: verify with a real verifier

Run the survivors through a verification service — most sending platforms include one. Keep “valid”, drop “invalid”, and make a decision about “catch-all” or “accept-all” results rather than pretending they don't exist: catch-all domains accept everything at the SMTP layer, so verification can't confirm the mailbox. Small-business hosting is full of them.

A reasonable policy is to send to catch-alls in a separate, slower stream and watch the reply and complaint rate before mixing them into the main sequence.

Step 4: expectations, honestly

Roughly 50–70% of businesses that have a website publish an email you can find — that's the ceiling of what's publicly available, not a limitation of any particular tool. After deduping and verification, expect the sendable list to be smaller again.

A smaller, clean list outperforms a large dirty one on every metric that matters, including the one that decides whether your emails arrive at all. If your list drops by half during cleaning, that's the process working.

Common questions