Glossary
Evidence-graded address
An evidence-graded address is an email address that carries a grade for how it was obtained: published on the company's own site, verified by its mail server, or inferred from a naming pattern.
Most prospect lists are guesses wearing a tie. A tool sees that one person at a company is first.last and assumes everyone is. Those guesses bounce, and bounces are negative votes against the sending mailbox.
An evidence-graded address is different in one way: it says how it knows. Published means the address is written on the company's own site. Verified means the mail server confirmed the mailbox exists, checked against a decoy so that catch-all domains do not fake a yes. Inferred means it was built from a pattern.
Only published and verified addresses are ever sent to. An inferred email is not an email. A probe that comes back undetermined is left undetermined, not degraded to nonexistent, because a rejected probe says something about our server, not about the mailbox.
Questions
Why not send to inferred addresses at low volume?
Because the mailbox that sends them pays for every bounce. Low volume only slows the damage. The address either has evidence or it waits until it does.
This term belongs to the outbound engineering glossary. The practice is defined on the category page.
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