A third of the contacts no longer matched
In October 2026 we took contacts whose work email we had found ourselves and looked each person up again with a second data provider.
of the contacts came back with a different work email from the one we had on file, which is 42,318 of 123,241 people.
- The SeedLift 2026 Contact Data Check found that 34% of B2B contacts had a different work email when they were looked up again (42,318 of 123,241 contacts).
- The SeedLift 2026 Contact Data Check found that 21% of B2B contacts came back on a different company domain, which usually means the person has changed jobs (25,474 of 123,241).
- The SeedLift 2026 Contact Data Check found that 14% of B2B contacts had a different email address at the same company (16,844 of 123,241).
The age of the record wasn't the cause
We expected older contacts to be wrong more often, and that isn't what the data showed.
of the emails we had found in the week before the check already came back on a different company domain.
Contacts we had held for over a year were no more likely to mismatch than contacts from a few months ago. That means we can't give an honest figure for how fast a list goes stale.
What the numbers do show is that a contact can be wrong on the day you get it. Two data providers often disagree about where the same person works, and the only way to settle it is to check the person's current profile.
- The SeedLift 2026 Contact Data Check found that 12% of work emails found within the previous week already pointed to a different company than a second provider reported (1,070 of 9,263 contacts).
Only a third of email addresses were safe to send to
Before we send anything, every address goes through an email verifier. These are the verdicts on every address we checked.
of the email addresses we checked came back as valid, which is 205,878 of 606,075 addresses.
- The SeedLift 2026 Contact Data Check found that only 34% of B2B email addresses passed verification as valid (205,878 of 606,075 addresses checked).
- The SeedLift 2026 Contact Data Check found that 33% of B2B email addresses were undeliverable when verified (202,312 of 606,075).
- The SeedLift 2026 Contact Data Check found that 33% of B2B email addresses could not be confirmed either way, mostly because the company's mail server accepts every address (197,699 of 606,075).
What we do about it
None of this is unusual for B2B data, so we plan for it on every list.
- We verify when the list is pulledAn address gets verified when it's about to go into a campaign, because a verdict from the day we found it tells us little a few months later.
- We check the person still works thereBefore LinkedIn outreach, and for the most important email lists, we check each person's current employer on their live profile. An email only counts as valid while the person is still at that company.
- We run a second check on the unconfirmed addressesAddresses the first verifier couldn't confirm go through a second tool built for mail servers that accept everything, and we only send to the ones it clears.
- We keep the bad verdictsOnce an address is marked undeliverable or bounces, it stays marked across every client, so nobody finds it again and sends to it.
The result shows up in the bounce rate. Across 344,620 cold emails in 2026, 1.24% bounced, even though a third of the raw addresses were undeliverable. The full figures are in our 2026 cold email statistics.
How we measured this
- The re-check covered 289,975 people whose work email we had sourced ourselves and who had a LinkedIn profile on file. A second data provider returned an email for 123,241 of them, and the figures are shares of those 123,241.
- "Different company domain" compares the part of the email after the @ sign. It also catches companies that changed their name or use two domains, so 21% is the upper limit for job changes.
- The verification figures cover all 606,075 addresses in our verification records as of November 10, 2026. They include addresses from email-finding tools, addresses guessed from a company's email pattern and addresses on imported lists.
- An address counts as undeliverable when a verifier marked it invalid or when it bounced after we sent to it.
- All figures are totals across programs, and no client or data provider is identified.
How to cite this page
You can use any figure here with credit to the SeedLift 2026 Contact Data Check and a link to this page. The date at the top shows the latest update.