The problem this solves
The report that lands in your Zoho Mail inbox at the end of this mission has two columns, before and after. Before shows how many contact emails in Zoho CRM were deliverable, risky, catch-all, invalid or missing when the sweep started. After shows the same counts once bounced and invalid addresses carry the do-not-email flag and catch-all domains carry a review tag. The gap between the two columns is the bounce rate you were about to send into.
CRM contacts decay whether or not anyone touches them. People change jobs, domains are retired after acquisitions, and addresses typed in from a business card were never valid to begin with. Zoho CRM stores the email and an Email Opt Out flag, and it has no way of knowing which addresses still reach a person until a send fails, by which point the failure has already counted against the sending domain.
Catch-all domains need a human decision rather than a flag. The server accepts every address, so verification cannot say whether this one reaches a person, and setting do-not-email on all of them would cut real contacts at large companies. Marking them for review keeps them sendable while making the uncertainty visible.
How the mission runs
- Read every contact with an email. The Lead Verification Agent pulls contacts from Zoho CRM (and leads too, if you include the Leads module), counts the records with and without an email, and reports the number to be verified with the credit estimate before starting. Records already marked as opted out are counted and skipped.
- Verify and classify. Each address is checked and classified as deliverable, risky, catch-all or invalid, with the reason recorded: mailbox confirmed, hard bounce history, no mail records for the domain, accept-all server, role account. The results are held in the workspace against the Zoho record ID so the write-back is exact.
- Stage the do-not-email updates. Bounced and invalid addresses are staged as an update to the Email Opt Out field on each record, together with a note carrying the verification reason and date. The batch shows the count of records that will change and waits for your approval; nothing in Zoho CRM is altered until you give it.
- Tag catch-all domains for manual review. Contacts on catch-all domains are grouped by domain with the count of contacts per domain, and staged with a review tag rather than an opt-out. The grouping lets you decide once per company: a domain with thirty contacts and an active deal is a different case from a domain with one contact and no history.
- Send the quality report through Zoho Mail. After the approved writes are applied, the agent recounts and sends the before-and-after report to your Zoho Mail address: counts per status before and after, records changed, catch-all domains awaiting review with their contact counts, and the records that could not be verified. A CSV of every changed record is attached.
The prompt
This is the exact objective the agent receives. Swap the obvious placeholders for your own domain, segment or channel and run it as-is from the console, Slack, or the API.
What comes back
Zoho CRM contacts with bounced and invalid addresses set to Email Opt Out and annotated with the verification reason and date, applied only after you approve the staged batch. Catch-all contacts tagged for review and grouped by domain so the decision is made per company. A before-and-after quality report in your Zoho Mail inbox with counts per status, records changed and a CSV of every change, plus the audit trail of verification calls and their credits.
Make it yours
- Scope the sweep to one owner, one lead source or one segment first, so the team sees the report on a small slice before the whole database is touched.
- Schedule it quarterly so addresses that have gone stale since the last sweep are caught before the next send, with the report showing movement between runs.
- For catch-all contacts with an active deal, ask the agent to find a second email or a direct phone through people search so the record stays reachable.
- Point the same sweep at HubSpot, Pipedrive or Attio; the opt-out field name changes and the rest of the mission is unchanged.
Frequently asked questions
Why set opt-out instead of deleting the contact?
Deleting removes history: deals, notes, activity. Email Opt Out keeps the record and stops sends, and the reason on the record tells the next person why. If you prefer a custom field over the standard opt-out, say so and the agent stages that instead.
What happens to catch-all contacts if I never review them?
They stay sendable with the review tag in place. You can ask the agent to move them to do-not-email after a period, or to re-verify them on the next sweep, which sometimes resolves a catch-all domain when the server configuration changes.
Is anything sent to the contacts themselves?
No. The mission reads and updates records and sends one report to you through Zoho Mail. No email goes to any contact, and every write happens only after your approval of the staged batch.