What "Verified" Means in Zyntro
A tick that nobody earned is worse than no tick at all
What It Is
A contact's email channel counts as verified when Zyntro holds a provider's answer about that specific address. Same for the phone channel and that specific number.
That is a narrower definition than it sounds, and it is narrower than the one your contact records have been using. Every contact also carries a plain flag — email_verified and phone_verified — and that flag is set by whatever created the contact. A form submission sets it. An import sets it. Neither of those asked anybody anything.
So the two can disagree completely. On one live account, 1,487 contacts carried a phone-verified flag while holding no phone number at all.
Why It Matters
Everything downstream of a contact acts on that flag, so a wrong one is not cosmetic.
An address flagged verified is sent to without a pre-send check. If the flag was a guess and the mailbox does not exist, the send bounces, and enough bounces damage the reputation of your sending domain for every other contact.
The reverse costs money. If you cannot tell a proven address from an assumed one, the only safe assumption is that nothing is proven — so you pay to check addresses that were checked last month.
This is why the verification banner does not quote the flag. It counts provider evidence, and on a typical account that produces a much larger number than the Unverified Emails card above it. The two are measuring different things: the card counts flags, the banner counts evidence.
How It Works
Four states, per channel
Each contact has four possible states for email and four for phone, and they are derived from the evidence stored on the contact rather than from the flag.
- Never checked — no provider has been asked about this value.
- Verified — a provider confirmed it.
- Unreachable — a provider rejected it.
- Unresolved — a provider was asked and could not reach a verdict.
The fourth state is the one that is easy to miss and the one that matters most to your bill. Some mail servers do not answer delivery probes at all, which means the honest answer is "nobody can tell". If that were recorded as never checked, the banner would offer to sell you the same answer again, every time.
How a state is reached
When you run a job, each contact's address or number is sent to the provider. A clear answer either way is recorded and the contact's flag is moved to match. If the provider does not answer, the item is tried again — up to three attempts in total. If all three attempts come back without a verdict, the contact is marked unresolved and that item is refunded.
Retrying is worth it. On one job, 8 of the 26 addresses that came back without a verdict on the first attempt were answered on a later one.
Where you see it
The four states appear as badges beside the address and number on the Manage Contacts table:
- Never checked shows nothing at all. A tick here is precisely the false assurance being removed.
- Verified shows a green seal.
- Verified, but on a catch-all domain shows a grey seal and a catch-all label.
- Unreachable shows a red seal, and hovering it gives the reason.
- Unresolved shows an amber question mark.
A verified phone number also shows its line type — mobile, landline or voip.
The same four states appear on the contacts list and beside the email and phone on a contact's own page, so every screen agrees about the same contact.
Examples
A webinar registration created 300 contacts last month and all 300 show a verified tick
The registration form set the flag as it wrote each contact. Open Manage Contacts and the verification banner will count all 300 under never checked, because no provider was ever asked. The tick records that a human typed the address into a form, which is weak evidence that it exists and none at all that it still accepts mail.
You click the seal beside a contact's phone number on their own page
That runs a real check. Zyntro asks you to confirm the cost first, then asks the provider, records the answer on the contact, and updates the badge — including the line type. The contact moves out of never checked in the verification banner, because now somebody actually asked.
A verification job reports 18 addresses as unresolved and refunds them
Those 18 are not bad addresses. Their mail servers declined to answer. Open the unresolved count in the banner and you will usually find they cluster onto a handful of domains — which makes it one decision about four domains rather than eighteen about addresses. You can retry them, or opt those contacts out of email.
Tip: If a group's description and the count above it seem to disagree, check which one you are reading. The data quality cards at the top of Manage Contacts count the stored flags. The verification banner beneath them counts provider evidence.
Info: A contact can still be marked verified by hand, but only as an explicit confirmation after a check has come back negative — some mail servers refuse delivery probes, and an operator who knows an address works needs a way to say so. A manual mark is recorded separately from provider evidence and never counts as a check.
