.edu is a generic top-level domain used by US higher education. Across 17,961 .edu addresses verified by BounceZero between April and October 2026, 32.8% were invalid, 8.3% catch-all, 18.5% unknown and 38.1% confirmed valid. The invalid share is far above the business average.
The .edu row is all 17,961 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| .edu | 17,961 | 32.8% | 8.3% | 18.5% | 38.1% |
| 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 .edu row: 2.2%.
Student and alumni mailboxes expire on a schedule, so a third of .edu addresses are invalid, and university gateways run catch-all more often than companies do.
University mailboxes are issued to students and staff and expire on a schedule tied to enrolment and employment, so a third of .edu addresses on any list older than an academic year are dead. University mail systems also run catch-all more often than companies do. Alumni addresses are the exception and survive for years. Lists of academic contacts should be re-verified every term and built from department pages rather than bought.
On confirmed-invalid rate, .edu ranks 3 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .us at 34.1%, ahead of .nz at 28.9%.
On unknown rate, .edu ranks 11 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .us at 21.9%, ahead of .au at 17.6%.
On confirmed-valid share, .edu ranks 15 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .co at 38.7%, ahead of .au at 37.3%.
How to read these rates: they are BounceZero's probe outcomes on customer lists over April to October 2026, not a census of .edu 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.
.edu leaves 18.5% of addresses unconfirmed. Hold them out of cold volume, re-check in a week, and move anything still unknown to a second channel.
More than one in 3 .edu addresses hard-fail. Use the domain as a staleness marker for the whole list, not just the segment.
8.3% of .edu addresses sit behind a catch-all accept. Those cannot be confirmed; send to them only from a secondary domain at low volume.
Just over 38% 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 before every academic send; expect heavy loss on lists older than one academic year.
Role addresses such as info@ and sales@ make up 0.2% of .edu addresses in the corpus. Role addresses rarely reach a person; prefer named contacts.
32.8% of 17,961 .edu addresses verified by BounceZero between April and October 2026 were confirmed invalid, against 14.5% across non-freemail domains and 17.6% across freemail.
18.5%. 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: 8.3% of .edu addresses sat behind a catch-all accept, so the server took any address and the mailbox could not be confirmed.
38.1% 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 .edu 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
2,095,440 .de addresses verified April to October 2026
65,636 EarthLink addresses verified April to October 2026
100,516 .fi addresses verified April to October 2026
119,582 .fr addresses verified April to October 2026
801,225 Gmail addresses verified April to October 2026
5,866 .gov addresses verified April to October 2026
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