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Evergrowth Documentation

No valid email or phone found after waterfalling

You ran the Email/Phone finder on a contact, the run finished, and you still have no usable email or phone number. This page explains what the result is telling you, why it happens, and what to do next.

Symptom

Section titled “Symptom”

After a finder run completes, the contact’s Email or Phone shows a result you did not expect:

  • In the Email column of the contacts list, and in the email slot of the Reach row on the contact’s detail page, you see a warning icon next to No valid email found.
  • On the contact’s detail page, the phone slot of the Reach row shows a warning icon next to No phone numbers found.
  • An address or number was returned, but its verification status is not the clean, send-ready result you were hoping for - for example Invalid, Unable to verify, Unverified, or Accept all on an email, or Unable to verify, Unverified, Bad Data, or Unknown on a phone number.

The warning text only appears once a search has actually run for that contact, and hovering it opens a card that says when it ran. If a contact has never been put through the finder, the slot offers the finder itself rather than a result - an unsearched contact is an offer to search, not something to explain.

Why this happens

Section titled “Why this happens”

The Email/Phone finder is a waterfall: it tries one contact-data source after another and stops when a result clears verification. There are two distinct outcomes behind these messages.

Nothing usable was found anywhere. “No valid email found” and “No phone numbers found” mean the waterfall worked through its sources and none of them returned a result that passed verification for this person. What it is looking for is a work address: where a source’s best answer for someone is a free consumer mailbox - the big webmail brands, including their per-country domains - that is not accepted as a work email and the search carries on, so a contact whose only findable address is a personal one can finish with nothing. This is most common for hard-to-reach segments - certain regions, smaller or private companies, and senior people who keep a low public footprint. It is a genuine coverage gap, not an error in your account.

A result was found, but verification graded it as risky. When a result does come back, it carries a status that tells you how much to trust it. For email, the statuses you may see are:

  • Safe to send - verified and good to use.
  • Accept all - the mail server accepts every address, so the result could not be individually confirmed. Treat it with care.
  • Invalid - verification did not come back clean; sending to it risks a bounce. This covers more than an address that was actively rejected: a check the provider could not conclude, or one still running on the provider’s side when the result was recorded, is graded the same way rather than being reported as a clean address. So an Invalid result on an address that looks plausible is worth re-checking later before you write the person off.
  • Unverified - verification was not completed.
  • Unable to verify - the provider could not reach a verdict.

For phone numbers, the statuses are Verified, In progress (still being checked), Unable to verify, Unverified, Bad Data (the provider flagged the number as bad or unusable, so it should not be dialed), and Unknown. Anything other than Safe to send on an email, or Verified on a phone, is flagged so you do not act on a number or address that may not hold up.

Each run draws on credits, so the practical question before re-running is always whether another attempt is worth the spend. For how the finder consumes credits, see Credits and billing.

How to fix it

Section titled “How to fix it”

  1. Decide whether it is worth another attempt. If the first run found nothing, or returned only weak statuses, the question is whether more sources are likely to help. For a high-value, well-known contact it usually is. For an obscure or private profile, it often is not - accept the gap and move on rather than spending repeated runs on a person the data sources do not cover.

  2. Take one of the alternatives the empty result offers. Once a channel has been searched and come back empty, the No valid email found or No phone numbers found label becomes the trigger for a card that holds every next step rather than re-offering the lookup that just failed. It opens with when the search ran and the plain statement that no provider returned a working address or number, then the options: Find email or Find phone (a fresh pass that does not skip the sources already tried, rather than a continuation of the failed one), Add manually to put in a value you already have, Reach out on LinkedIn when a profile is on file, and Find someone else at the account, which runs the Contact finder on that company because a different person there may be the faster route in. Pick the one that matches how much this contact is worth. If the honest answer is to stop spending on this record, add it to Do Not Touch from the contact’s overflow menu - see Contact detail page.

  3. Or re-run the finder from the list. Select the contact in the contacts list and choose Email/Phone finder from the actions. This opens the Find emails & phone numbers window, where you turn on Search for email, Search for phone number, or both, and choose Start. For a contact that already has a value, choose Always search for a fresh one to search past it rather than keeping what is there. See Find email and phone.

  4. Verify a phone number you already have. If a number was returned but is not yet checked, select the contact and choose Verify phone from the actions, or hover the number and select Verify on its details card, to put it through verification without running a fresh search.

  5. Put in the value you already have. The data sources are not the only route. If a rep has the address or the direct dial from a call, an email signature, or a business card, add it to the record by hand from the edit control beside the value, and lock it so later finder runs cannot replace it. That also covers the opposite case: an address the finder returned that you know is wrong can be pushed down with a thumbs-down, so the next best value takes over and a re-find will not promote the bad one again - and the one that did work can be thumbed up to become the main value. See Add, correct or lock a value by hand.

  6. Accept the gap and reflect it in your list. When a contact genuinely cannot be reached, leave it and focus your effort and credits where the data exists. Use the Has email and Has phone filters on the contacts list to separate reachable contacts from the rest: set Has email to keep only contacts that carry a usable email, and Has phone for those with a phone number. Filtering to the reachable set lets you build a clean working list and run a play against people you can actually contact. See Filter contacts.

  7. Match the lookup to your channel. If your outreach is email-only, there is no need to chase a phone number, and vice versa. Running only the lookup you need keeps the result focused and avoids spending on a channel you will not use.

For how the waterfall works end to end and why it draws on many sources, see Email and phone waterfall. For how verification statuses and the related fields are defined, see Record statuses and fields.

Section titled “Related”