Trust beats tactics™

Positioning

Validation tells you if an address exists. Intelligence tells you if you should send to it.

Both read the same address. Only one of them reads the business doing the sending.

Every validator on the market runs the same four checks: syntax, MX lookup, SMTP RCPT TO, catch-all probe. They answer one question: will this address return a 550 bounce. Intelligence checks the receiver-side reputation, address pattern risk, mailbox provider history, and 30 plus engagement signals against your sending pattern. Then it tells you Keep, Monitor, or Suppress, with the labels behind the call.

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Every Trustpilot review is 5 stars. Litmus Coach Award winner. Trusted by deliverability pros.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki, looking at the camera. She’s the founder.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki

Litmus Coach 2020·Ask a Deliverability Expert·8,000+ lists reviewed·Lenovo Twinning Finalist

01A worked example

Same list. Same labels. Different decisions.

Take one illustrative list of 19,000 addresses and run it for three different businesses. The label engine returns the same three top labels every time. The sender context decides what to do with them. Watch the verdicts swap.

Worked example · illustrative, not a customer job
worked-example.csv 19,000 addresses one upload, three readings

Top labels on the uploaded list

Academic .edu11,627 addresses · 61% of the list
Role Account1,512 addresses · 8% of the list
Engagement Decay4,178 addresses · 22% of the list

Worked example · local pizza shop

worked-example.csv19,000 addresses
38% keep52% monitor10% suppress
context

Worked example · online casino

worked-example.csv19,000 addresses
22% keep48% monitor30% suppress

Same list. Same labels. Different verdicts.

A worked example, not a customer story. The numbers are illustrative. The logic is exactly what runs on your list.

Worked example pizza shop · row 6,412
Address under review
d.okafor@hartwell.edu
KEEP
MONITOR
SUPPRESS
Academic .edu Engagement Decay
The reasoning, in plain English

The quiet stretch is the academic calendar, not a dead inbox. Campus empties in May and this mailbox goes quiet with it. Hold it in Monitor, send one re-engagement in August move-in week, then promote it back to Keep when it clicks.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki
Worked example
Reason: academic calendar, not decay
Worked example online casino · row 6,412
Address under review
d.okafor@hartwell.edu
KEEP
MONITOR
SUPPRESS
Academic .edu Compliance flag
The reasoning, in plain English

Same mailbox, different sender, different stakes. A regulated operator mailing a student address is a compliance question before it is a deliverability one. Different jurisdictions, different risks. Suppress and move on.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki
Worked example
Reason: compliance before deliverability

One address. Two businesses. Two verdicts.

University athletics department

Season tickets, alumni outreach, donor pipeline

71% keep22% monitor7% suppress

Sender health for this list 78/100

Academic .eduKEEP

Your audience lives on .edu. Faculty, staff, alumni who kept the school address. This is your core list, not a risk signal.

Role AccountKEEP

tickets@, athletics@, boosters@ are how a department reaches the right desk. Mailing role accounts here is the job.

Engagement DecayMONITOR

Game schedule drives engagement. A quiet stretch in July is normal. Recheck after the season opener instead of suppressing now.

What a validator calls risky is what they call Tuesday.

Local pizza shop

Weekly specials, loyalty club, neighborhood reach

38% keep52% monitor10% suppress

Sender health for this list 56/100

Academic .eduMONITOR

Cleaning cycle is synced to the academic calendar. Move to Monitor over summer, then send a re-engagement email in August move-in week before promoting back to Keep.

Role AccountSUPPRESS

A pizza shop is not selling enterprise software. info@ and contact@ here are aliases that nobody reads on a Friday night.

Engagement DecayMONITOR

Could be a customer who moved. Could be a customer who is just busy. Try one re-engagement send before you suppress.

Same label, different story. We tell you what RME sees. You tell us if they are still in town.

Online casino

Promotions, VIP tier, weekly bonuses

22% keep48% monitor30% suppress

Sender health for this list 38/100

Academic .eduSUPPRESS

A regulated operator mailing a student email is a compliance flag. Different jurisdictions, different risks. Suppress and move on.

Role AccountSUPPRESS

Casino promos to abuse@ or compliance@ inboxes is the fastest path to a complaint that costs you a sending domain.

Engagement DecayKEEP

Engagement cadence here is industry-normal. Keep with a faster recheck cadence and pull suppressions based on your own bonus-abuse signals, not validator quiet.

Low engagement looks like a dead list to a validator. To us, it is industry-normal with a different cleaning rhythm.

RME is one tool. Best list cleaning happens in conjunction with what only you know.

02What gets checked

Same four shared checks. Ten more on the intelligence side.

The mechanism behind every call is printed under each row. We do not redact the method, only the per-customer weights.

Check A validation tool Review My Emails
Syntax check ✓ ✓

RFC 5321 / 5322 grammar parse. Validators and intelligence both run it; cheap shared baseline.

MX record lookup ✓ ✓

Authoritative MX query on the address domain. Same DNS lookup either way.

SMTP verification ✓ ✓

Open a session to the MX, RCPT TO the address, watch the response code class.

Catch-all detection ✓ ✓

We watch the SMTP RCPT TO response code class. Validators accept 250 OK; we also check 251 / 252 ambiguity that mailbox providers return when a domain accepts all.

Disposable address detection ✓ ✓

Domain match against the public disposable-provider list (Mailinator, Guerrilla Mail, 10MinuteMail, plus newer rotators).

Domain reputation signals · ✓

Domain age (registration date), MX configuration changes in the last 90 days, blocklist presence checks across major domain and IP blocklists, plus DKIM selector existence by name.

Blocklist exposure check · ✓

Live query of receiver-side blocklists against the address domain and sending IPs you forward us.

Address pattern risk flags · ✓

Addresses matching dictionary-attack patterns. Addresses on domains with elevated risk signals from the last quarter. Fresh signup versus long-inactive signal separated.

Provider behavior history · ✓

Per-mailbox-provider deferral and rejection rates for the address class (B2B vs consumer, ISP vs corporate). Outlook treats freemail very differently from Google Workspace.

Engagement signal scoring · ✓

Receiver-side engagement signals (over 30 of them) cross-referenced with your declared sending pattern. The same address can be Keep for one sender and Suppress for another.

WHOIS age and history · ✓

Registration date, registrar churn, name-server moves, recent privacy-shield flips. Brand-new domains and recently-moved domains carry different risk.

Role account risk assessment · ✓

Role prefix match (info@, sales@, support@, abuse@) plus per-role complaint history at the address domain. Not all role accounts carry the same risk.

Actionable verdict (Keep / Monitor / Suppress) · ✓

One-word call per address, with a defined protocol attached to each verdict. Validators stop at valid / invalid; we tell you what to do next.

Reasoning behind each call · ✓

Per-address label set (e.g. New Domain, Catch-All Server, Blocklist Presence) attached to the verdict so you can audit, override, and report.

A validation tool · output
d.okafor@hartwell.eduVALID
orders@brightleafsupply.comVALID
m.tremblay@lakeshoremail.comVALID
k.baptiste@fernwoodmedia.coVALID

“Four addresses. All valid. That is the whole report.”

Review My Emails · output
d.okafor@hartwell.eduAcademic .eduMONITOR
orders@brightleafsupply.comRole AccountMONITOR
m.tremblay@lakeshoremail.comEngaged recipientKEEP
k.baptiste@fernwoodmedia.coProvider flip < 90dSUPPRESS

“Same four addresses, read in context.”

Side by side: validator output (valid / invalid) vs Review My Emails (verdict plus labels plus per-row reasoning).

03Where validation ends

The gap that costs you

If you have ever cleaned your list with a validation tool and still landed in spam, you have lived this gap. The tool did its job. It confirmed your addresses were real. Real and safe to mail are different things.

Long-inactive addresses on changed-hands domains are real addresses. Abandoned inboxes are real addresses. Addresses on domains that are actively blocklisted are real addresses. Validators are not built to catch any of those.

If all you need to know is whether an address will bounce, a validator is fine. If you need to know whether an address will hurt your deliverability, you need intelligence.

The line, in one breath

“A validator tells you an address exists. We read that address in the context of your business, where it came from, how it behaves, and whether it’s quietly costing you money to keep sending to, then tell you what to do about it.”

Yanna-Torry Aspraki · Founder, Review My Emails

Twice a month. Real changes only.

New questions, deliverability shifts at Gmail and Outlook, and any tool that landed since the last issue. No fluff, no upsell.

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The same address can be safe for one business and expensive for another. That’s not a mystery. It’s context.

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Yanna-Torry Aspraki, sitting at a desk, looking at the camera. She’s the founder.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki

Founder, Review My Emails