Verify email addresses before sending

You can have HuntSales check that each recipient address is real before a campaign sends to it, to reduce bounces and protect your sender reputation. Turn it on under Email Setup, Email Settings, "Verify email addresses before sending" (an admin with the Manage team permission or the workspace owner controls the toggle; it is off by default and applies to the whole workspace).

While it is off, the Campaigns page shows a short notice, "Protect your sending domain", suggesting you turn it on, and a shorter one appears when you create or launch a campaign. When your latest campaign with at least 50 emails sent bounced 2% or more, the notice on the Campaigns page says so. "Turn on" opens this same setting, with its cost shown before anything is saved; members who cannot change the setting see "Ask your Super Admin" instead. "Not now" (or the X) hides the notice for you for 30 days, on that browser. It goes away for everyone once the setting is on.

Before the setting is saved you are shown exactly what it will cost: how many campaign addresses are queued to send right now, how many of those have never been checked, what that comes to in credits, and the ongoing rate of about 500 credits per 1,000 new recipients. Only campaign mail is counted, because only campaign mail is checked - one-off sends and replies are never verified and never charged. Turning it on is your go-ahead for those checks to run automatically at send time, which is why the number is shown up front - the send itself never stops to ask. If the queue is very large we may not be able to work the total out inside that click; when that happens we say so and you can still turn it on, because the rate does not change and a cost estimate failing is not a reason to leave your sending unprotected. If your balance will not cover what is queued, the confirm screen says so, and says what happens then: once the credits run out, the emails still waiting for a check are held, not sent and not lost, and are listed on Email Review as "Re-checking" while they wait. They are retried every hour inside the campaign's send window, so a top-up gets them checked on the next retry with nothing for you to do. Anything still held after 24 hours moves to "Waiting on you" on that page, where you can send it anyway or mark it undeliverable. Running out of credits never sends an email unchecked.

Turning it off asks you to confirm first, in one step. We do not recommend it: without the check, campaign emails go to new addresses unchecked, and bounces are paid for in sender reputation, which cannot be refunded. The trade-off is real, though. On a list that was verified before you imported it, the check rarely finds a bad address, so it catches little for the credits it costs, and turning it off for a list like that is a reasonable call. Addresses that have been checked before are never charged again, so turning it off saves nothing on those. Once you confirm it takes effect immediately and costs nothing, and you can turn it back on at any time (you are shown the cost again when you do).

Once it is on, two things spend without asking again, and they behave differently. Read them apart, because only one of them has a ceiling.

The first is the background pre-check. To get ahead of a campaign, HuntSales checks addresses already queued for a later send, in the background, so the send itself is not held up. That part is bounded and reports back: it never spends more than 200 credits a day for your workspace, it never runs at all unless this setting is on, it stops rather than take your balance below zero, and when it uses credits the workspace owners get a notification, at most once a day, saying how many addresses were checked and what it cost. If a check fails on our side the credits go back on your balance; your credit history lists the original charge rather than a separate refund line. Anything above that daily ceiling is simply checked later, at send time, or on the Email Verification page where you see the count and the total before you click.

The second is the check at the moment of sending, for anything the background pass did not already cover. That one has no spending ceiling: it costs 0.5 credits for every new address you send to, however many that is, and it is disclosed rather than limited. Every check we charge for appears in your credit history, and the workspace owners get a notification, at most once a day, when these automatic send-time checks pass 200 credits. If you want a hard ceiling on verification spend, turn this setting off and verify on the Email Verification page instead, where every run shows its count and total before you click. What it will never do is skip the check and send anyway: if a check cannot run - no credits, no answer from the checking service, a setting we cannot read - that email is held rather than sent. The single exception is a platform-wide incident in which HuntSales switches checking off for everyone to keep mail moving; that is a deliberate, temporary step, never a silent one, and it is the only circumstance in which a campaign email leaves unchecked.

Nothing is wasted under either, because an address is only ever paid for once.

When it is on, each recipient's address is checked before the send. A new address is sent for checking the first time it comes up and the email waits for the answer, held rather than sent; the answer usually comes back within minutes, and the email goes out on the next sending run. A check costs 0.5 credits per new address, and an address is only ever checked ONCE: a verdict never expires on a timer, so re-sending to the same person is always free. It is revisited only when a bounce proves the old verdict wrong, and in that case the bounce itself supplies the new verdict at no charge. A contact added at the 2-credit rate (from Account Map, Suggested Audiences, the Copilot or MCP) that arrived with an email was already checked when you added it, at no extra cost, so this step finds it cached and charges nothing. The charge applies whether the address turns out valid or not. If an address comes back clearly undeliverable, that send is skipped and the contact's email is marked invalid, so you never bounce on it. If the check finds the address likely to work but the mail server does not confirm the mailbox (shown as "Likely, not confirmed"), the email is sent, though it may still bounce; to skip those addresses, tick only Valid in the campaign's "Email deliverability filter". If the check cannot reach a verdict at all - a catch-all domain, or a mail server that will not answer - the send is HELD rather than sent, and appears under Email Review for you to approve or reject. Those are the addresses most likely to bounce, so they are not waved through. Nothing is lost: approving one puts it straight back in the queue, and the decision is remembered for that contact's later steps. Rejecting one marks the address undeliverable for your workspace only and cancels the held email. Deciding needs the Campaigns and Email Setup permission, and a later confirmed bounce still overrules an approval. See "Email Review: approving held sends". You can also check a single contact any time from the Verify button on their email in the contact drawer. The Verify button on a contact charges 0.5 credits only when it runs a fresh check: a check from the last 30 days is shown free, and an older one is checked again.

Two things to know. First, while this setting is on, an address is never sent to unchecked. If a check cannot run at all - your credit balance is too low to pay for it, the checking service is not answering, or a run has already used its share of checks - that email is HELD instead of sent. It is retried automatically: every fifteen minutes when the checking service is the problem, and hourly when it is a credit shortage, so a top-up is picked up on the next hourly retry inside the campaign's send window. It goes out by itself the moment a check succeeds. Held emails are listed on the Email Review page marked "Re-checking" so you can see exactly what is waiting and why, and you can push any of them through from there without waiting. If an address is still unconfirmable 24 hours later it stops retrying and becomes a decision for you on that same page - from that point a top-up no longer releases it, because it is now waiting on your answer rather than on the check. This is a deliberate trade: your campaign can pause, but it will not send to an address that has not been checked. Second, verifying an address confirms the mailbox can receive mail; it does not guarantee your email lands in the inbox rather than spam. Inbox placement still depends on your sender reputation, warm-up, content, and authentication.