Email prospecting glossary

The words used in Veriphee reports and in the trade, defined in two or three sentences, without needless jargon.

By Bertrand Menesguen, founder of Créacodeal · Updated : 2026-09-16

Role address: An address that designates a function rather than a person, of the contact@, info@, commercial@ or rh@ kind. It is almost always valid, often read by several people, and gives results far below those of a named address in prospecting.
Catch-all: A domain configured so that its mail server accepts every address presented to it, even addresses that do not exist. A verification can therefore neither confirm nor rule out an address on that domain. See the guide devoted to catch-all.
Deliverability: The ability of a sender's messages to reach the inbox rather than the spam folder. It depends on the reputation of the sending domain, which is itself damaged by bounces, complaints and poorly targeted bulk sending.
DMARC: A public record that tells receiving servers how to handle a message whose sender is not authenticated: let it through, quarantine it or reject it. It complements SPF and DKIM, which prove that a message really does come from the domain it claims.
Mail domain: The domain that appears after the at sign and actually receives the mail. It is not always the same as the website domain: a company can show a .com site and receive its email on another domain, which is the leading cause of failure in an address search.
Address format, or pattern: The rule a company uses to build its addresses, for example firstname.lastname, f.lastname or firstname. It is almost always the same for all staff, which makes it possible to rebuild the address of a known person from a single observed address.
Greylisting, or temporary deferral: An anti-spam protection that answers an unknown sender with a temporary refusal, counting on the fact that a real server will try again. For a verification it produces an undetermined verdict, which a second pass usually clears.
Legitimate interest: The GDPR legal basis that allows data to be processed without prior consent when the interest pursued is proportionate and the rights of the people concerned are preserved. It is the basis accepted by the CNIL, the French data protection authority, for prospecting between professionals, provided the person is informed and their objection respected.
Company officer: A person vested with a management mandate by the articles of association or the shareholders' meeting: président, gérant, directeur général. Their identity is public in the French company register, unlike that of operational directors, who hold no mandate.
MX record: A public DNS record that names the server responsible for receiving a domain's mail. A domain with no MX record cannot receive any email: every address built on that domain is unusable, whatever its format.
Right to object: The right of any person to refuse the use of their data for prospecting purposes. In B2B it is exercised without having to give a reason, must be signaled in every message, and must be honored immediately and permanently.
Hard bounce and soft bounce: A hard bounce is a permanent refusal of a message by the receiving server, usually because the mailbox does not exist. A soft bounce is a temporary refusal, caused by a full mailbox or an outage. Hard bounces damage the sender's reputation, which is why verifying before writing is worth the effort.
SIREN and SIRET: The SIREN is the nine-digit number that identifies a French company. The SIRET, fourteen digits, identifies one of its establishments. The SIREN serves as the key for retrieving a company's legal form, address, activity and officers.
SMTP: The protocol servers use to exchange mail. It proceeds in steps: greeting, announcement of the sender, announcement of the recipient, then transmission of the message. It is because the recipient is accepted or refused before transmission that verification without sending is possible.
Verification without sending: Checking that a mailbox exists through a dialogue with the mail server that is broken off before the message is transmitted. The recipient receives nothing and is notified of nothing. See the guide devoted to verification.
Confidence score: A rating given to an address the server could not confirm, computed from converging signals: company format confirmed, person in post, address published on the web. It makes it possible to tell a probable address from a purely uncertain one.