• by Ray Schultz , February 28, 2023

Marketing emails are very sloppily created, judging by The Email List Decay Report for 2023, a study from Zerobounce. 

In one year, Zerobounce saw 10 million email typos.

Moreover, only 57.21% of all emails submitted to by clients in 2022 were valid. 

In contrast, 20.19% were invalid emails, while 16.74% were catch-all emails, while 1.19% were abuse emails, 1.32% were do-not-mail addresses and 0.01% were spam traps. 

Abuse emails are defined as those from known complainers who have a history of reporting many emails as spam. 

Catch-all emails are tied to domains that accept all emails sent to them, even if the email addresses do not exist, the study says. 

The company estimates that at least 22.71% of an email list degrades yearly. 

In another finding, the study reports that  disposable emails are a typical way people avoid giving out their real email addresses. Last year, ZeroBounce identified 5+ million such addresses. 

But email validity was 0.45% better in 2022 than the year before. 

"Any database can acquire poor-quality email addresses which cause email deliverability to plummet," says ZeroBounce founder and CEO Liviu Tanase.  

Tanase adds, "Reaching the inbox is getting increasingly difficult, and using a healthy email database is a must.” 

Invalid addresses are the most prevalent problem, while catch-all emails are the second segment of email addresses likely to bounce.