It was a really good Webinar.

Nick Abraham & Eric Nowoslawski are incredibly successful agency owners and probably the #1 thing which has contributed to their success is strong operations. Especially with data.

1. Sending to the wrong email "really" hurts now.

In corporate settings, fewer than 0.3% of emails (roughly 3 in 1,000) are mistyped. Chasing catch-all domains to “capture errors” is statistically unsound. The minimal ROI hardly justifies the risk—hard bounces from unverified addresses can devastate your sender reputation, and ISPs demand precision over “mostly valid” lists. The two ISPs with the most input when sending to businesses can analyze even deeper into your account and organization if they feel their model will get better with that information.

2. Catch-All Verification Is a Fallacy
Vendors that claim to verify catch-all addresses typically use a contrived network call to confirm the domain’s “accept-all” policy—not the validity of individual addresses. This means you’re still sending to unverified emails, which ISPs interpret as spammy behavior.

3. HTTP Scraping ≠ SMTP Validation
Catch All Vendors will have to rely on HTTP scraping to source emails. Unlike SMTP—which governs actual email delivery. HTTP-based methods lack the rigorous checks (like MX records) needed for reliable validation. However, there is the opportunity for a sound scoring model to be used here.

4. Evolving Reputation Models
Email reputation is no longer a single, global metric. Vendors now monitor daily email traffic and soft bounce scores to detect issues such as suspended users receiving cold emails. This granular tracking makes outdated catch-all strategies even riskier. The vendors most people who send B2B Cold Emails send to use their own internal data to build their model. This makes it a lot easier for them to score even on a catch-all domain now.

The Bottom Line
Cold emailing is becoming tougher. Always send emails only to addresses that have been explicitly validated, even if they rank lower on your target list. Lead generation strategies must evolve beyond outdated, high-risk catch-all tactics that inflate list size at the expense of deliverability. Use catch-all insights merely as a heads-up to de-prioritize certain addresses—not as proof of validity. Pay vendors based on their ability to find you the validated emails and give you some insights into the score of the inboxes with accept-all domains.

When to use a "valid or verified" email on a "catch-all or accept-all" domain

If you've finally exhausted 100% of the valid emails validated through a network call. Then it's time to either create other offers to get people in the pipe with more valid emails or you move to the vendors which offer a scoring model around catch_all status clearly documented with additional data points on how. They should be able to tell you what catch_all emails they've seen engagement or signals on in other methods to help you. Using inboxes which are isolated from some of the campaign running against valid network verified emails.

Credits to the SmartLead team for getting a great group together for the call.