An email found on a website is not the same as an email that works. We ran 2,094 emails from California business websites through SMTP verification, and here is what came back.
When a lead list says "email included," the address was usually copied from the business's own website. Nobody has confirmed that the mailbox exists. In an earlier post we showed how often an email can be found. This post covers the next question: of the emails that are found, how many pass a verification check?
We collected California contractor and restaurant listings from Google Maps, read each business's website for a public email, removed obvious junk (placeholder addresses, job and resume mailboxes, duplicates) and then ran the remaining addresses through an email verification service that tests the mail server with an SMTP check. We did this for customer work, in two batches, and the results were very close each time.
If a list is sold with scraped emails and no verification, then in our data about half of those emails would not have been confirmed. Sending to unconfirmed addresses can hurt your sender reputation. Verification is also cheap: checking all 669 emails in the latest batch cost about $0.55 in verification fees, under one cent per email.
For what we mean by a verified lead, see What Are Verified Leads.
Try a small sample of leads, then decide whether the data fits how you work.
See the Free Trial →In our own checks of 2,094 emails found on California contractor and restaurant websites, 1,143 (55%) came back valid. The share was 49% for contractors and 59% for restaurants. These are results from our own batches, not an industry benchmark.
Risky usually means the mail server accepts any address, so the check cannot confirm that this particular mailbox exists. It is not proven bad, but it is not confirmed either. We do not include risky emails in a delivery.
Unknown means the mail server did not give a clear answer when it was checked, so the address could not be confirmed either way. We treat it like risky and leave it out.
No. Valid means the verification found no problem with the address and the mailbox appears to exist. It does not guarantee delivery, a read, or a reply, and we did not send test emails to these addresses.
For our last batch, verifying 669 emails cost about $0.55 in verification fees, under one cent per email. Prices depend on the tool and the volume.
How we tested: Google Maps listings were collected with a Google Maps scraper, emails were read from each business's website, and each address was checked with an email verification service. The batches are from customer work in California in October 2026, cover two kinds of business, were not random samples and were not independently audited. Results will differ by niche, location and date.