// Glossary
The contact-data glossary.
Every term you'll hit while finding, verifying, and reaching contacts — defined in plain English.
Absentee Owner
A property owner whose mailing address differs from the property address, a sign they don't live there.
B2B Leads
Business contacts at target companies, identified by role and firmographics, for sales prospecting.
Batch Skip Tracing
Running skip tracing on a whole list of records at once rather than one at a time.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of sent emails that fail to deliver, a key signal mailbox providers use to judge a sender.
CAN-SPAM
The US law setting rules for commercial email: honest headers, a valid address, and a working unsubscribe.
Cash Buyer
An investor who purchases property without financing, a disposition target for wholesalers.
Catch-All Domain
A domain configured to accept mail for every address, so a mailbox-level verification can't confirm a specific inbox exists.
CCPA / CPRA
California's privacy laws giving residents rights to know, delete, and opt out of the sale of their personal data.
Cold Email
An unsolicited but compliant email sent to a prospect you have no prior relationship with to start a conversation.
Cold Outreach
Proactively contacting prospects you have no relationship with across email, phone, or social to generate leads.
Contactability Score
A rating of how reliably you can actually reach a contact, based on verification status across their channels.
Credit Header Data
The identifying information at the top of a credit file: name, aliases, addresses, and SSN, not the credit score.
Data Append
Adding specific fields to existing records by matching them against a reference dataset.
Data Broker
A company that collects and sells personal or business contact data aggregated from many sources.
Deliverability
Whether your email actually reaches the inbox rather than the spam folder or getting blocked entirely.
Disposable Email
A temporary, throwaway address from a burner service that stops working shortly after it's created.
DNC Scrub
Removing numbers on the National Do-Not-Call Registry from a list before marketing calls or texts.
Do-Not-Call (DNC)
Registries and internal lists of numbers that have opted out of telemarketing calls and must be suppressed.
Domain Warmup
Gradually ramping send volume from a new domain or IP to build sender reputation before sending at scale.
Driving for Dollars
Scouting neighborhoods for distressed or vacant properties to build an off-market lead list.
DSAR
A formal request from an individual to access, correct, or delete the personal data a company holds about them.
Email Finder
A tool that locates a person's professional email address from their name and company.
Email Permutation
Generating likely email formats from a name and domain, then verifying which one actually exists.
Email Verification
Checking whether an email address is real, correctly formatted, and able to receive mail before you send to it.
Firmographics
Descriptive attributes of a company, like industry, size, revenue, and location, used to target B2B accounts.
Follower-Graph Snowball
Discovering similar creators by expanding outward from one account through its followers and connections.
GDPR
The EU data-protection law governing how personal data of people in the EU is collected, processed, and stored.
Hard Bounce
A permanent delivery failure, usually because the address doesn't exist or the domain can't receive mail.
HLR Lookup
A query to a mobile carrier's Home Location Register that confirms whether a phone number is provisioned and active on a carrier.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
A definition of the company and buyer most likely to become a high-value customer, used to focus targeting.
Intent Data
Signals that a company or person is actively researching a solution, indicating they may be ready to buy.
Lead Enrichment
Filling in missing details on a contact or company record from external data sources to make it more complete.
Line Type
Whether a phone number is mobile, landline, or VoIP, which affects how you can reach it by SMS and which consent rules apply.
Line-Type Validation
Checking whether a phone number is a live mobile, landline, or VoIP line, and whether it's connected.
Link-in-Bio
The single clickable link on a social profile, often a landing page that lists a creator's other links.
List Hygiene
Regularly cleaning an email list by removing invalid, stale, and unengaged addresses to keep it healthy.
List Stacking
Combining multiple lead lists to find owners who appear on several, a stronger motivation signal.
Motivated Seller
A property owner with a reason to sell quickly, often below market value.
MX Record
A DNS record that names the mail servers responsible for receiving email for a domain.
Niche Tag
A category label applied to a creator, like fitness or beauty, used to filter and segment creator lists.
Non-FCRA Data
Locate data sold for marketing that legally can't be used for credit, housing, employment, or other eligibility decisions.
Opt-Out
A person's request to stop receiving messages, which must be honored and added to your suppression list.
Permissible Purpose
A use the FCRA allows for a consumer report, such as collecting an account.
Phone Verification
Confirming a phone number is real and active on a carrier, and identifying its line type, before you call or text.
Pre-Foreclosure
The period after a default notice but before the property goes to foreclosure sale.
Pretexting
Obtaining someone's financial or personal data by impersonation, a federal crime under GLBA.
Provenance
The recorded origin of a piece of contact data: which source and engine it came from and when.
Public-Data Scraping
Collecting information that's publicly visible on the web, like profile pages, in a structured, automated way.
Reverse Append
Backfilling a phone number from an email address on a contact you already have.
Reverse Email Append
Starting from an email address and looking up the matching person and their other contact details.
Reverse Phone Append
Starting from a phone number and looking up the matching person, their name, and related contact details.
Right-Party Contact
Reaching the actual person you're trying to locate, not a wrong number or an outdated line.
Role-Based Email
An address tied to a function rather than a person, like info@ or sales@, often shared by several people.
Sender Reputation
A score mailbox providers assign your sending domain and IP that determines whether mail lands in inbox or spam.
Skip Trace Hit Rate
The share of records in a skip-trace run that come back with a usable phone number or email.
Skip Tracer
A person or tool that locates people by finding their current contact information.
Skip Tracing
The process of finding a person's current contact information from limited starting details, like a name and an old address.
SMTP Check
A live handshake with a mail server that asks whether a specific mailbox would accept delivery, without sending an email.
Soft Bounce
A temporary delivery failure, such as a full mailbox or a server that's down, that may succeed on retry.
Suppression List
A list of contacts you must never send to, including unsubscribes, complaints, and DNC numbers.
TCPA
The US law governing telemarketing calls, texts, and autodialers, requiring consent before contacting consumers.
Verified Lead
A contact whose details have been checked as real and reachable, not just collected and assumed valid.
Waterfall Skip Tracing
Running records through multiple data sources in sequence, cheapest first, to lift the overall match rate.
Work Email vs Personal Email
The distinction between a company-domain business address and a free consumer mailbox like Gmail.