.ca is the country domain used in Canada. Across 7,561 .ca addresses verified by BounceZero between April and October 2026, 15.9% were invalid, 6.2% catch-all, 13.8% unknown and 54.4% confirmed valid. Catch-all and unknown together mean a large share cannot be confirmed.
Every .ca address BounceZero verified for customers between April and October 2026, beside the corpus benchmarks. The remainder of each row to 100% is risky and role results.
| Segment | Addresses | Invalid | Catch-all | Unknown | Confirmed valid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| .ca | 7,561 | 15.9% | 6.2% | 13.8% | 54.4% |
| All non-freemail domains (business and ISP) | 6,514,884 | 14.5% | 2.3% | 27.0% | 32.6% |
| Business domains only (consumer ISP and freemail excluded) | 1,269,919 | 22.9% | 9.4% | 22.5% | 40.3% |
| All freemail | 1,415,154 | 17.6% | 1.1% | 2.1% | 74.0% |
Non-freemail includes consumer ISP mailboxes; a business-only cut is on the benchmarks page. Method and every other cut: Lead List Quality Benchmarks 2026. Risky and role on the .ca row: 9.7%.
Business-heavy with rates near .com; some corporate gateways refuse probes.
Canadian lists are business-heavy with rates close to .com, and corporate gateways at larger employers account for most unknowns. Canada's anti-spam law, CASL, is among the strictest: it requires express or implied consent for commercial email, with implied consent limited to existing relationships and conspicuously published business addresses. The lawful basis therefore matters more than the bounce rate for any Canadian segment. Canadian company domains are split between .ca and .com, with the .ca share higher among smaller firms, professional practices and public bodies. Verification results on .ca are reliable, and the unknown share comes from gateways at banks, insurers and government. Because CASL penalties are per message, the sensible order is consent audit first, verification second, and sending only to the intersection.
On confirmed-invalid rate, .ca ranks 12 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .com at 16.4%, ahead of .br at 15.3%.
On unknown rate, .ca ranks 16 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .com at 14.7%, ahead of .br at 12.0%.
On confirmed-valid share, .ca ranks 8 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .nl at 54.6%, ahead of .at at 53.4%.
How to read these rates: they are BounceZero's probe outcomes on customer lists over April to October 2026, not a census of .ca mailboxes. Unknown and catch-all measure what verification could not confirm, which depends on the provider's gateway policy during the window as much as on the addresses. The lists are the ones customers chose to upload, so segments dominated by a few large uploads carry their age and source. Method and limitations: benchmarks page.
.ca leaves 13.8% of addresses unconfirmed. Hold them out of cold volume, re-check in a week, and move anything still unknown to a second channel.
Roughly one in 6 .ca addresses is dead, against about one in 7 across non-freemail lists.
6.2% of .ca addresses sit behind a catch-all accept. Those cannot be confirmed; send to them only from a secondary domain at low volume.
Just over 54% confirmed valid: reachable today, re-verified before every send, since only 19.2% of addresses were still valid 90 days after a check in BounceZero's decay study.
Verify at import; CASL requires consent for most commercial email to Canadians, so the lawful basis matters more than the bounce rate.
Role addresses such as info@ and sales@ make up 11.0% of .ca addresses in the corpus. Role addresses rarely reach a person; prefer named contacts.
15.9% of 7,561 .ca addresses verified by BounceZero between April and October 2026 were confirmed invalid, against 14.5% across non-freemail domains and 17.6% across freemail.
13.8%. Unknown means the mailbox could not be confirmed either way, usually because the gateway deferred the probe. BounceZero refunds unknown results; re-check after a week or use a second channel.
Partly: 6.2% of .ca addresses sat behind a catch-all accept, so the server took any address and the mailbox could not be confirmed.
54.4% confirmed valid at verification time. Keep bounces under 2% and complaints under 0.3% on the send, and re-verify the segment before every send.
Upload the file and see valid, invalid, catch-all and unknown per row, with the .ca segment against this benchmark. 100 free checks a month, unknowns refunded.
Ayoub built BounceZero's 5-stage validation pipeline, its dedicated BGP-announced IP infrastructure, and the Patroni HA PostgreSQL cluster behind every verification. Previously built high-volume email delivery infrastructure. Trained at 1337 Benguerir (École 42 network, 2019). Open-source: bgp_analyzer.
Invalid, catch-all and unknown rates per email provider and country domain, 2026
21,684 Bluewin (Swisscom) addresses verified April to October 2026
8,450 .br addresses verified April to October 2026
30,522 .ch addresses verified April to October 2026
6,159 .co addresses verified April to October 2026
2,158,955 .com addresses verified April to October 2026
2,095,440 .de addresses verified April to October 2026
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