.com is a generic top-level domain used by global business and United States. Across 2,158,955 .com addresses verified by BounceZero between April and October 2026, 16.4% were invalid, 4.4% catch-all, 14.7% unknown and 59.7% confirmed valid. Catch-all and unknown together mean a large share cannot be confirmed.
The .com row is all 2,158,955 addresses verified in the six months to October 2026; the other rows are the benchmarks from the same corpus. Risky and role results fill each row to 100%.
| Segment | Addresses | Invalid | Catch-all | Unknown | Confirmed valid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| .com | 2,158,955 | 16.4% | 4.4% | 14.7% | 59.7% |
| 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 .com row: 4.8%.
The default business domain worldwide. Its rates are the benchmark everything else is read against: about one in six invalid, a moderate catch-all share and a seventh of addresses behind gateways that refuse probes.
The .com segment is the largest in the corpus and the one every other segment is compared against. It mixes US and global companies with freemail providers that also sit on .com, so its rates sit between the pure business and pure freemail benchmarks. The unknown share is driven by corporate gateways at larger employers and by Yahoo-platform freemail, and the catch-all share by small companies whose mail hosting accepts any address.
On confirmed-invalid rate, .com ranks 11 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .uk at 17.0%, ahead of .ca at 15.9%.
On unknown rate, .com ranks 15 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .ae at 14.9%, ahead of .ca at 13.8%.
On confirmed-valid share, .com ranks 4 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .it at 64.2%, ahead of .fi at 59.6%.
How to read these rates: they are BounceZero's probe outcomes on customer lists over April to October 2026, not a census of .com 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.
About one in 7 .com addresses cannot be confirmed either way. That is gateway behaviour, not a verdict; route those contacts to phone or LinkedIn and re-check after a week.
Roughly one in 6 .com addresses is dead, against about one in 7 across non-freemail lists.
4.4% of .com addresses sit behind a catch-all accept. Those cannot be confirmed; send to them only from a secondary domain at low volume.
59.7% of .com addresses confirmed as deliverable at verification time and can go straight to the primary sequence, with a re-check before every send.
Verify every .com export at import. Unknowns here are mostly corporate gateways; route them to phone or LinkedIn rather than deleting.
Role addresses such as info@ and sales@ make up 4.9% of .com addresses in the corpus. Role addresses rarely reach a person; prefer named contacts.
16.4% of 2,158,955 .com addresses verified by BounceZero between April and October 2026 were confirmed invalid, against 14.5% across non-freemail domains and 17.6% across freemail.
14.7%. 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: 4.4% of .com addresses sat behind a catch-all accept, so the server took any address and the mailbox could not be confirmed.
59.7% 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 .com 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
30,522 .ch addresses verified April to October 2026
6,159 .co addresses verified April to October 2026
2,095,440 .de addresses verified April to October 2026
65,636 EarthLink addresses verified April to October 2026
17,961 .edu addresses verified April to October 2026
100,516 .fi addresses verified April to October 2026
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