.nz is the country domain used in New Zealand. Across 36,773 .nz addresses verified by BounceZero between April and October 2026, 28.9% were invalid, 0.1% catch-all, 3.6% unknown and 11.6% confirmed valid. The verdicts are reliable and can be acted on directly.
The .nz row is all 36,773 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| .nz | 36,773 | 28.9% | 0.1% | 3.6% | 11.6% |
| 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 .nz row: 55.6%.
Dominated by ISP consumer mailboxes with high churn and a large risky band; confirmed-valid is low.
New Zealand lists are dominated by Spark's xtra.co.nz and other ISP mailboxes that follow broadband contracts, which produces a high invalid rate and a large risky band. Business domains in New Zealand verify well. The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act requires consent for commercial email, with an exception for existing business relationships, so the ISP segment needs a lawful basis before anything else. New Zealand company domains on .co.nz and .nz are hosted mostly on Microsoft and Google and verify cleanly. The ISP mailboxes from Spark, Vodafone and smaller providers churn with contracts and are where the invalid and risky results come from. Lists of New Zealand small businesses often hold the owner's ISP address rather than a company one, which is why the country row looks worse than the business row.
On confirmed-invalid rate, .nz ranks 4 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .edu at 32.8%, ahead of .gov at 24.7%.
On unknown rate, .nz ranks 21 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .nl at 4.5%, ahead of .it at 3.2%.
On confirmed-valid share, .nz ranks 23 of 23 country domains in the corpus, just behind .de at 16.5%.
How to read these rates: they are BounceZero's probe outcomes on customer lists over April to October 2026, not a census of .nz 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.
Unknown is a rounding error on .nz at 3.6%; the gateway gives a clear answer and the verdict stands.
.nz runs at 28.9% 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 .nz (0.1%); when this provider does return valid, the mailbox accepted the probe itself rather than a blanket accept.
Confirmed valid is 11.6%. Send to that slice from the primary domain and treat the rest of the .nz segment as unreachable by cold email.
Note the risky and role share: 55.6% of .nz 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.
Prefer business domains over ISP addresses in New Zealand lists; verify the risky band before any send.
Role addresses such as info@ and sales@ make up 0.3% of .nz addresses in the corpus. Role addresses rarely reach a person; prefer named contacts.
28.9% of 36,773 .nz addresses verified by BounceZero between April and October 2026 were confirmed invalid, against 14.5% across non-freemail domains and 17.6% across freemail.
3.6%. Unknown means the mailbox could not be confirmed either way, usually because the gateway deferred the probe. BounceZero refunds unknown results; on .nz it is rare enough to re-check once and move on.
Not in practice: 0.1% of .nz addresses returned catch-all, so a valid verdict means the mailbox exists.
11.6% 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 .nz 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
1,252,193 .net addresses verified April to October 2026
87,309 .nl addresses verified April to October 2026
38,181 Optimum addresses verified April to October 2026
56,401 .org addresses verified April to October 2026
25,971 PeoplePC addresses verified April to October 2026
232,302 SBCGlobal addresses verified April to October 2026
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