.net is a generic top-level domain used by mixed, with many legacy US ISP mailboxes. Across 1,252,193 .net addresses verified by BounceZero between April and October 2026, 17.6% were invalid, 0.6% catch-all, 28.8% unknown and 19.9% confirmed valid. Catch-all and unknown together mean a large share cannot be confirmed.
Every .net 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| .net | 1,252,193 | 17.6% | 0.6% | 28.8% | 19.9% |
| 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 .net row: 33.0%.
.net on lead lists is dominated by legacy US ISP consumer addresses, which is why its profile looks like att.net and bellsouth.net rather than like business domains.
On lead lists .net is not a business domain but a collection of legacy US ISP brands: att.net, sbcglobal.net, bellsouth.net, earthlink.net, windstream.net and optimum.net together account for most of the segment. That is why its profile mirrors those providers rather than any company. A .net business domain on a list should be judged on its own merits, and the ISP share should be split out before the list's quality is assessed.
On confirmed-invalid rate, .net ranks 8 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .nl at 21.9%, ahead of .co at 17.1%.
On unknown rate, .net ranks 5 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .at at 29.1%, ahead of .org at 25.0%.
On confirmed-valid share, .net ranks 20 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .us at 29.1%, ahead of .ch at 19.6%.
How to read these rates: they are BounceZero's probe outcomes on customer lists over April to October 2026, not a census of .net 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 3 .net 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.
.net runs at 17.6% confirmed invalid, ordinary for a list that has not been checked in a while; the failures are closed mailboxes and should be removed.
Catch-all is negligible on .net (0.6%); when this provider does return valid, the mailbox accepted the probe itself rather than a blanket accept.
Confirmed valid is 19.9%. Send to that slice from the primary domain and treat the rest of the .net segment as unreachable by cold email.
Note the risky and role share: 33.0% of .net results landed there, which the four headline columns do not show. Read risky as 'deliverable but with a flag' and test it at low volume before trusting it.
Separate .net ISP addresses from .net business domains before judging the segment; the two behave differently.
Role addresses such as info@ and sales@ make up 0.4% of .net addresses in the corpus. Role addresses rarely reach a person; prefer named contacts.
17.6% of 1,252,193 .net addresses verified by BounceZero between April and October 2026 were confirmed invalid, against 14.5% across non-freemail domains and 17.6% across freemail.
28.8%. 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.
Not in practice: 0.6% of .net addresses returned catch-all, so a valid verdict means the mailbox exists.
19.9% 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 .net 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
104,996 Luukku addresses verified April to October 2026
39,022 MindSpring addresses verified April to October 2026
87,309 .nl addresses verified April to October 2026
36,773 .nz addresses verified April to October 2026
38,181 Optimum addresses verified April to October 2026
56,401 .org addresses verified April to October 2026
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