Validate contact details before you rely on them

Whether the number is currently connected on an Australian network, established without placing a call, so the person on the end of it never knows the check happened.

Disconnected numbers and never-allocated numbers are flagged separately, and the distinction is useful. A disconnected number was valid once and belonged to someone, which usually means your record is simply out of date. A never-allocated number was never real at all, which points to a typo at capture or a deliberately false entry.

The check runs live at query time instead of reading a stored status, so the answer reflects the network now, not when the record was built.

No. The check verifies the domain and then the mailbox at the server level, so nothing is delivered and the address owner sees nothing at all.

This matters for two reasons. Sending a test message to check an address is visible to the recipient and unwelcome, and at file scale it is exactly the behaviour that gets a sending domain flagged.

A server-level check gives you the same answer without spending any sender reputation to get it.

Matching an address against the Geocoded National Address File, the authoritative register of Australian addresses.

A GNAF match confirms two things: that the address physically exists, and what its standard written form is. The second is often the more useful. Addresses arrive in a great many formats, and standardising them is what makes deduplication, mail sorting and geographic segmentation work at all.

An address that fails GNAF is not always wrong, but it is always worth looking at. Most failures are unit numbers in the wrong field, missing street types, or suburbs that do not match their postcode.

Telemarketing calls to numbers on the Do Not Call Register are prohibited unless an exemption applies to you.

Checking DNC status before a campaign is the standard control, and the check records that you performed it. That record is the part that matters if you are ever asked to demonstrate compliance, because the obligation is assessed as at the date of the call.

A file washed six months ago and dialled today provides no protection. Numbers are added to the register continuously, and a stale wash date is close to no wash at all.

Because the cost of a bad contact detail rises steeply with time.

A typo caught at capture is corrected by the customer in seconds, while they are still on the form and still know their own phone number. The same typo found three months later is a research task: someone has to work out what the number should have been, and often the answer is that nobody can.

Validating at capture also stops the error propagating. A bad address entered once is copied into billing, marketing and delivery systems within days, and each copy has to be corrected separately afterwards.

Directly, and it compounds. High bounce rates cause receiving providers to filter your domain, which means the messages that were going to legitimate, valid addresses stop landing too.

That is the part organisations tend to miss. The cost of an invalid address is not the one message that bounces; it is the reputational damage to the sending domain, which degrades delivery for the entire list.

Validating before the send keeps bounce rates low enough that legitimate mail continues reaching inboxes. On the phone side the equivalent waste is more visible but less contagious: disconnected numbers consume call-centre time at file scale, but they do not make your other calls fail.

Upload a file through Insiight, or call the bulk endpoints directly.

Results return per record and per field, not as a single pass or fail for each row. That granularity is what makes the output actionable: a record with a valid address, a dead phone number and a good email needs a different treatment from one that fails everything, and a single verdict would collapse the two.

With per-field results you can fix, suppress or route each problem separately, which usually means most of the file stays usable instead of being quarantined wholesale.

Connectivity and deliverability checks run live at the time of the query. They are not read from a cached status that may be months old.

DNC status reflects the register as at the check date, and that date is recorded with the result, because the date is what compliance turns on.

The practical consequence is that these checks are worth running close to the moment you rely on them. A validation run performed immediately before a campaign is materially more useful than the same run performed at the start of the quarter.