List verification cadence is the schedule on which you re-check the email addresses on a list, for example before every send, once a month or once a quarter.
A verification result is a snapshot. It says the mailbox accepted mail on the day it was checked (SMTP, RFC 5321, September 2026). Cadence is the rule that decides when that snapshot is too old to trust.
Why it matters for outbound
A list that was clean in January is not clean in June. People change jobs and mailboxes get closed, so addresses go bad while the file sits in your CRM.
Every dead address you send to is a hard bounce. Enough of them damage the sending domain, and that hurts every later campaign, not just the one that bounced.
Our rule: tie cadence to send volume and list age, not to the calendar. Re-verify any list before a large send if its last check is older than the data refresh. Re-verify lists you mail every week more often than lists you mail twice a year. See how to verify a cold email list in bulk.
Example
You keep a list of 4,000 contacts for Acme, a placeholder customer, and plan a send on 1 June.
- Read the verification date on each address. A batch checked on 2 March is three months old.
- Pull every address checked more than 30 days before the send.
- Re-verify that set and drop anything that comes back
invalidorrisky. - Send only to the addresses that still pass. Log the new check date.
The 30 days is an example, not a standard. Choose a number you can defend, then keep to it.
Lists that sit idle between campaigns, such as donor files, need the same discipline. See email verification for nonprofits.
In LeadOcean data
LeadOcean gives you two dates to build a cadence on. The dataset is refreshed monthly, and each record carries its own fetched_at date. On v2 work email results (GET /v2/people/email/work), verified_batch_date is the date of the verification run that confirmed the address (openapi.json, September 2026).
A whole batch shares one date, so read it as "checked in that run", not as a timestamp for that single address. A null there means the verdict was not LeadOcean's own.
Every person record also carries email_status, and emailStatus is a filter on /v1/people/search. The free count_leads MCP tool counts verified, catch_all_valid and catch_all people by default, so you can size a re-send list without spending records. LeadOcean has no built-in scheduler: you run the cadence in your own workflow. Pricing is on /pricing.
More guides sit in the deliverability and verification hub.
Related terms
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