A CRM does not go wrong all at once
Export the contacts you still send to, run them through Cuvy, and each address comes back either confirmed, marked as doubtful, or attached to somebody who has changed employer. Confirming an address you already held is free; you are charged only when a new address is handed over, one credit for the person rather than one for each attempt.
- Confirming an address you supplied
- Free
- A contact who has moved
- 1 credit for the new address
- The same person, found again
- Charged once, ever
- Records deleted or overwritten
- None
50 addresses free every month · no card
The records did not rot. The people moved.
Nobody updates your CRM on their way out of a job, and the address dies with the job rather than with the row.
The database was right when you built it. Then people changed employer, a few changed surname, a couple of companies were bought and moved to a new domain, and none of it produced a single event in your CRM. The rows still look exactly as authoritative as they did the day they were entered, which is the whole difficulty: decay is invisible from the inside.
There is a decay percentage quoted in every article written about this, and we are not going to add ours to the pile — we have not measured your database and neither has anybody who published a figure. The measurement that would mean something is cheap to take: pull the contacts you added two years ago and see how many still resolve. Whatever it comes to, it is not nothing, and it compounds.
Meanwhile the failure is silent in the way that matters. A dead address produces no reply, and no reply looks precisely like a prospect who is not interested — so the segment quietly underperforms and the copy gets blamed. The bounces do the rest of the damage somewhere you cannot see it, which is the last section of this page.
Four steps over the contacts you still mail
- A segment, not a dump
Export the segment you actually mail
Not the whole database. The contacts you have touched in the last eighteen months are the ones worth checking; everything older is archaeology, and it makes the pass larger without making the next campaign better.
- Your rows stay yours
Re-check rather than re-buy
Addresses you already hold are checked at no charge, because nothing new is being handed over. A credit is only spent where the check turns up a replacement address you did not have.
- Moved, not just dead
Read the three answers
A row comes back still good, unable to be confirmed again, or belonging to somebody who is now somewhere else. The third is the one worth acting on first, and it is the one a bounce report never tells you.
- Matched on ID
Write it back on your own key
Push into HubSpot, or take a CSV keyed on your own record ID so the import matches on the ID rather than on the address that has just changed.
Five marks, and the sighting behind each one
No score out of a hundred, and no traffic-light column. A mark you can sort on, and the evidence it rests on.
- Confirmed
- One source only
- Changed employer
- Could not be confirmed again
- Left exactly as you sent it
A confidence score compresses several different things into one number and then invites you to pick a threshold, which is how a row that was seen once in 2023 ends up in the same bucket as one a verifier reached this morning. A mark and its sighting keep those apart. You can filter on the mark; you can read the source when the mark is not enough.
The changed-employer mark is the one worth building a workflow around. It says the person is somewhere else now, and where a new work address exists it is found in the same pass and attached to the same person — not charged again, not merged into a second record. Nothing is deleted and nothing you sent us is overwritten. What a stale row is worth keeping is a decision about your data, and it stays yours.
You are billed for people, and only for the new ones
- Re-confirming what you already had
- Checking an address you supplied hands you nothing you did not have, so it is not charged and does not appear on the invoice. A database that is mostly still accurate is mostly free to check.
- One human, one credit, whatever they do next
- Somebody who has changed employer twice since you first met them is a single charge, once, on the workspace that paid it. The second and third addresses for that person are updates, not purchases.
- Two records, one person
- Duplicates are the normal state of a CRM. Two rows carrying the same name and the same employer are collapsed into one person and charged for once. Two rows that spell either differently are two people to the matcher — we do not fuzzy-match names, because a wrong merge costs more to undo than a duplicate does to delete. Tidying the spellings before a pass is the cheapest thing you can do to it.
What operations teams ask before a clean-up
How often is it worth re-checking a CRM?
It depends on the segment rather than on the calendar. The list you actively mail is worth a pass each quarter; an archive you write to twice a year can wait for the year. If you would rather not run passes at all, job-change monitoring on Pro watches saved lists continuously and tells you when somebody moves, which is the same work spread out instead of done in batches.
Do I pay again for the contacts whose addresses turn out to be fine?
No. Checking an address you supplied is free, because nothing new has been handed over. A credit is charged only where a lookup produces an address you did not already have, and then once for that person. A pass over a database where most addresses still work is therefore mostly free — the bill is roughly the size of your churn.
What do you do about a contact who has left the company?
The row is flagged as moved and, where a new work address exists, it is found in the same pass. That person is not charged a second time: if a credit was already spent on them at the old employer, the new address does not cost another. What we will not do is swap the address under the old record and leave nothing to show that anything happened.
Does Cuvy write back into HubSpot on its own?
Only if you ask it to. The default output is a file. Where a CRM is connected, a push adds or updates the fields you mapped and nothing else: it does not delete records, does not merge your duplicate records, and does not touch fields it was not given. Duplicates are removed from what is about to be sent to you, which is a different thing from merging what is already in there.
Will a catch-all domain come back looking clean?
It comes back marked, not passed. A re-check cannot tell you whether the contact you hold is still at that company, so the row is flagged for a human rather than given a clean bill — and if they have moved, that shows as a job change instead. Treat a catch-all account as unchecked, and work them in order of the revenue behind them.
How much does a bounce actually cost me?
We cannot price your domain reputation and will not pretend to. What can be said is what a bounce does: mailbox providers grade a sending domain partly on how much of what it sends fails to land, and that grade is applied to the next campaign as well as this one — including the part of it addressed to people who were perfectly reachable. It is the one cost in this process that never appears on an invoice.
50 addresses free every month · no card