About 1 in 12 Emails Scraped From Google Maps Is Dead

The number, and how we got it

We took a random sample of 700 business emails scraped from Google Maps listings and ran every one through SMTP verification. About 8 percent, roughly 1 in 12, came back invalid: the mailbox does not exist, so mail to it bounces. A much larger share sat on catch-all domains, where the server accepts everything and deliverability cannot be proven either way.

We publish this as a measured figure from our own data, not a marketing round number. The exact rate moves with industry and geography. But the shape of it is stable and worth internalizing: a raw scraped list is never as clean as its row count suggests.

Why scraped emails go dead

A business website is a snapshot in time, and a scraper reads whatever is on the page the day it visits. None of the reasons an address stops working leave a visible mark on the page:

People leave. The address you scraped belonged to someone who is no longer there, and nobody updated the site. Mailboxes get retired when a company reorganizes its email. Domains lapse or migrate. And a role address like info@ that worked last year can quietly stop accepting mail after a provider change. The scraper cannot see any of this. It sees text that looks like an email and hands it to you.

The catch-all trap makes it worse

Even verification does not save you on every domain. A large share of business mail servers are configured to accept mail for any address at the domain, real or not. These catch-all domains answer "yes" to everything, so a standard verification check proves nothing about whether the specific mailbox exists.

This matters twice. First, some of your scraped addresses on catch-all domains will bounce despite looking fine. Second, and this is the part the industry hides, any tool that pattern-guesses addresses and tests them against catch-all domains can report a beautiful pass rate that means almost nothing. If a vendor leads with a big accuracy percentage, the first question is whether catch-all acceptances are in the numerator.

Why the bounce costs more than the lead

A bounce is not a neutral event. Mailbox providers watch your bounce rate as a signal of list quality, and a run of hard bounces tells them you are sending to a list you did not clean. The penalty is not the single lost email. It is a quieter deliverability drag on everything you send afterward, including to good addresses. Sender reputation is slow to build and slow to repair, which is exactly why protecting it beats fixing it.

At a 1-in-12 dead rate, a 1,000-row scraped list carries roughly 80 guaranteed bounces before you account for the catch-all uncertainty on top. Send that cold and you are not just wasting 80 emails, you are teaching the mailbox providers to trust you a little less.

What to do about it

Two habits fix almost all of the damage.

First, know the number. If your lead tool does not SMTP-verify, treat every address it gives you as a candidate, not a green light. "Found an email" and "confirmed an email is deliverable" are different claims, and only one of them is safe to send to.

Second, verify before you send. Run the list through SMTP verification, either built into your tool or as a dedicated pass, and drop or quarantine anything that comes back invalid. Flag catch-all domains as lower confidence rather than trusting them blindly. Verification costs a fraction of a cent per address. A damaged sending domain costs weeks.

This is how verification works inside Lyre Leads: every email can be SMTP-verified and labeled honestly as verified, catch-all, unknown, or rejected, so you never confuse "we found it" with "it will land." We would rather show you that an address is risky than hand you a clean-looking list that quietly bounces. The label is the product.