How to Verify Email Addresses in Pipedrive and Update Contacts

Pipedrive does not verify email addresses. Its Campaigns feature marks a contact Bounced after delivery fails, and nothing checks a mailbox before you send. To clean your contacts, export people with their Pipedrive ID, verify the emails with an outside tool, then re-import the results mapped to that ID so each row updates the right person.

The steps and limits here come from Pipedrive's knowledge base, read on 6 October 2026.

What Pipedrive does with bad addresses today

Pipedrive learns an address is bad from Campaigns bounces, after the send. Its marketing contacts article lists the marketing statuses a contact can have, including Subscribed, Unsubscribed and Bounced, and defines Bounced as: "The contact has had emails hard-bounce (permanent delivery failure) or soft-bounce (temporary delivery failure) five times."

It also says that "Email campaigns will only be successfully sent to contacts with a subscribed status". So once a contact is Bounced, Campaigns stops sending to it. That protects later campaigns, but only after the damage is done: the first send to a list full of dead addresses still produces the bounces.

The Campaigns reporting article splits failures into four types, and they are worth reading separately:

Bounce type	Pipedrive's description	Is the address the problem?
Hard	"email addresses that don't exist, likely due to typos, incorrect domains or inactive email addresses"	Yes
Soft	"the email address is correct, but the email was not delivered due to content rejection, the receiver's inbox being full..."	Usually not
Temporary	Delivery attempted multiple times but "the recipient's server not responding"	No, at least not yet
Blocked	Caused by "inappropriate links" or the receiver blocking "your email address or IP"	No, it is you

Only the first row is what verification catches. A hard bounce means the mailbox or domain does not exist, which a verifier can usually tell you without sending anything. Blocked bounces point at your sending reputation or content, and deleting those contacts would throw away real people.

Step 1: Create a field for the verification result

Add a person custom field to store the result, so you can filter on it later. Pipedrive's custom fields guide gives the path: open the account menu in the upper right, go to Personal preferences > Data fields, choose the person entity, and click + Custom field. Only users "with the correct global permissions enabled" can add fields.

A single option field works well, with options such as valid, invalid, risky and unknown. A second date field for "verified on" tells you when a result is stale. Pipedrive says custom fields make it "easier to organize, filter and manage your data", and they show up during import mapping, which is what Step 4 needs.

Step 2: Export people with their ID

Show the ID column in the people list view before exporting, because the ID is what lets you update records rather than duplicate them.

Pipedrive's guide to updating data with a spreadsheet explains that every person, organization and deal has a unique system ID, and that you can add it as a list view column: click the gear icon, open Choose columns, select the ID field and save.

Then follow the export guide:

1. Open the contacts (people) list view.
2. Apply a filter for the people you want to check.
3. Use the gear icon to choose columns: at least the person ID, name and email.
4. Click ... > Export filter results.

Two permissions apply. "Only global admins and regular users with the correct permissions enabled can export data", and "you can only export the data that's visible to you based on your visibility group or item visibility." If your export looks short, visibility settings are the likely reason.

Step 3: Verify the addresses

Verify the unique email addresses, then map each result back to every person ID that shares the address.

Deduplicating first saves time when the same address appears on more than one person. The verifier should check the domain's MX records, ask the mail server about the mailbox, and flag catch-all domains, where the server accepts any address and no single mailbox can be confirmed. Those belong in a risky bucket, not valid.

SimpleVerifier takes a CSV of up to 100,000 rows and returns email, status and reason columns, with valid, risky and invalid available as separate exports. Whatever tool you use, keep the reason: "mailbox does not exist" and "server timed out" lead to different decisions. Our guide to verification statuses explains how vendors label these.

Join the results back to your export with a lookup in your spreadsheet, so you end up with a file of person ID, verification status and verified date. Removing invalid emails from a CSV walks through that join if you have not done one before.

Step 4: Import the results back by ID

Re-import the file and map the ID column to the Pipedrive person ID, so Pipedrive updates existing people instead of creating new ones.

The update guide is direct about how this works: "import the spreadsheet to Pipedrive and map the corresponding ID fields to their columns", and "Pipedrive will know which elements you are updating based on the Pipedrive System ID." It also warns that any non-ID column you include will overwrite existing data. Do not leave the name or email columns in the file unless you mean to change them. A file of ID, status and date is safest.

Limits from Pipedrive's import guide: XLS, XLSX or CSV, "No more than 50,000 rows" and "File size under 50 MB". Split larger exports into several files.

When the import finishes, the summary shows how many records were "added, updated, merged or skipped". For an update file, you want everything in the updated count. If a mistake slips through, "Only users with global admin permissions can revert imports", and only "within 48 hours".

Why not match on email instead of ID?

Without an ID, Pipedrive matches people by organization, phone or email and merges them, which is harder to predict. Its duplicates article says that once a person's name is recognized, if any of the "Person - Organization", "Person - Phone" or "Person - Email" fields match another person, it will "merge them together and add any new data included in the import." That is helpful for importing new leads. For writing results back, it can merge two genuinely different people at the same company. Map the ID and the question does not arise.

Step 5: Act on the results

Filter by your new field and handle each status differently; do not mass-delete.

Status	What to do in Pipedrive
valid	Nothing. The verified date tells you when to re-check
invalid	Exclude from Campaigns and sales sequences. Look for a current address before giving up on the person; deals and notes on the record still matter
risky	Keep, but send in smaller batches or one-to-one
unknown	Re-verify in a few days

A saved list view filter on "verification status is invalid" gives the sales team one place to see contacts that need a new email address. Contact data decays steadily as people change jobs, so schedule the export and re-check every few months rather than treating this as a one-time clean.

To check a single prospect's address before a call or an important email, the free email verifier shows the result and the reason for one address at a time.