Email list cleaning is a spendy process. It’s more expensive than sending email itself with your own MTA. It requires validating if they email is a threat like a trap or litigator or verify if they email is deliverable, catch-all or bounce. The process that goes into our own validation and verification sends your list through 9 GB of suppressions and 3 SMTP handshakes for each email where we pick the best 2 out of 3 for reporting. Verify550 is not a data aggregator nor does it email advertisements or sell data. We just clean lists. We are not interested in doing anything with our client’s data because our process is in real time. That is why we charge $1,000 per million. To get accurate results and to not touch our client’s databases.

But beware of the lesser price validation or verification companies. Just because they are less expensive doesn’t mean they are not going to keep your data. Validation is less expensive thus they can charge less but verification simply is the cash hog. If someone is saying they can do verification at a cost of less than $500 per million, you better have discernment. It costs a verification company at least $300 to verify 1 million records and that is a stretch considering we know it costs more than that for accurate results. This means they are offhooting the price in exchange for something else. The only thing besides money they can get from you is your data. And what can they do with it? Sell it. Monetize it. Trade it. You name it.

Many small companies who have no budget as me for free email validation or where they can find it. My last article explains that well but we highly recommend you not go in this direction as you can lose the value of your data quick. Free services most definitely are using your data in exchange for free email verification (so they say) thus you just shot yourself in the foot. There is no such thing as free data scrubbing! Get smart of steer clear away from these types of services whether they offer you to upload your data online or offer you a desktop solution.

And remember, the cheaper the solution, the more likely the company is going to keep a copy of your data. You should know by now that this industry is full of snakes. Finding an email verification tool that fits your cheap budget is a poor business decision. If you do not understand list management, email marketing, analytics and managing deliverabiity, you will be taken advantage and learning too soon the pitfalls of giving up your data in exchange for saving a little money. It is not worth it.