Email Data for Outreach
Overview
PDL provides many email-related fields to support a variety of different use cases, ranging from powering direct outreach to matching profiles for entity resolution.
In this guide we’ll focus specifically on using PDL’s email data for email outreach. This includes powering your outreach campaigns, supplying contact info in your platform to your own end users, and any other scenario where the intention is to use PDL’s email data to reach out to a specific target audience.
This page will explain which fields to use, which to avoid, and why.
TLDR
For email outreach, use only:
Do not use:
The latter two fields include historical emails and have lower deliverability rates.
Which email fields should you use?
The only fields that PDL recommends using for email outreach are the following two fields:
These two fields are intended to represent a person’s current personal and work email and are the best-suited fields for connecting with a person. Furthermore, as of October 2025, we have also increased our efforts to validate the deliverability of emails in these two fields (more details below).
- Best available personal email for outreach
- Ideal for non-work-related communication
- Optimized for direct contact and higher deliverability
- Selected from the
personal_emailsfield
- Most up-to-date professional email address
- Intended for business-related outreach
- Optimized to reduce bounces from outdated work emails
Which to use?
Which you use depends on your specific goals, but a general pattern we see with our users is:
- Recruiting/Candidate Outreach use cases tend to leverage the
recommended_personal_emailfield in order to connect with candidates outside of their work inbox - Sales/Marketing Outreach use cases tend to prefer the
work_emailfield in order to reach contacts within their professional work environment.
What about PDL's other email fields?
In the Person Schema, you will find several other email-related fields alongside the two mentioned above:
However, unlike the recommended_personal_email and work_email fields, these fields are meant to track both current and historical emails, with the primary goal being entity resolution (e.g. matching data to a profile based on any of the emails ever associated with that individual).
As a result, we do not make any efforts to ensure the current or deliverability status of the emails in these fields, and only focus on ensuring that the emails can be confidently associated to a profile at any point in its history.
Therefore, we strongly discourage the use of these fields in your outreach efforts, especially without additional effort on your part to ensure the emails are deliverable and active.
What happens if you use historical emails for outreach?
Using outdated or inactive emails in your outreach can significantly harm both campaign performance and, more importantly, your sender reputation. These addresses increase bounce rates, trigger spam complaints, and waste valuable resources.
A damaged sender reputation - marked by high bounces and low engagement - causes emails to be filtered into spam folders or blocked entirely, making it difficult to reach your audience. Because sender reputation takes a long time to recover, the consequences of poor list hygiene can be long-lasting.
Email outreach best practices
PDL Email Outreach Best Practice Guide
As a resource for our users, here is an in-depth guide on Email Outreach Best Practices, created by our Solutions Engineering Team:
Apart from using the correct email fields, there are some key best practices that we strongly encourage our users to follow when launching and running their outreach campaigns. These include:
- Validating Emails to minimize bounce rates
- Leverage domain warmup strategies to protect sender reputation
- Ongoing monitoring of campaign performance metrics
These are covered in detail in our email outreach best practice guide linked at the top of this section.
The one we will take a closer look at here is email validation
Email Validation
Whether you are getting your emails from PDL or any other data provider, it is important to always ensure the deliverability of any emails you intend to use in your outreach. As we explained above, any inactive or non-deliverable emails that get included in your outreach can have extremely damaging long-term effects on your ability to send outreach in the future.
Emails can become inactive or invalid at any time, and so even previously validated emails should be revalidated immediately before outreach. This is true for any emails you use whether they come from PDL or other providers.
Recommendations
Our recommendation is to validate your emails once a quarter at minimum, but ideally immediately before kicking off any large outreach campaigns or anytime you begin to notice large drops in deliverability.
Email Validation Services
To validate the deliverability of your emails, there are a variety of trusted validation services available on the market.
PDL customers have access to discount incentives through our partnership with Bouncer.com, but there are many other similar providers available.
The most important thing is that you are able to verify the deliverability status of the emails you intend to use to ensure that you do not include any emails that are no longer active or deliverable.
PDL Email Deliverability Improvements
In October 2025, PDL kicked off an initiative to revitalize and revamp the way email validation is done on our top-level email fields. In particular, we began validating and removing non-deliverable emails from the recommended_personal_email and work_email fields.
The goal of this initiative is to ensure higher success rates when using these fields for outreach and to help provide ongoing deliverability validation for these emails. This work is expected to continue into the first few couple quarters of 2026.
Note that this work does not change our recommendation to continue validating any emails you intend to use for outreach since an email’s deliverability status can change on any given day.
For more information on these deliverability improvements, please see our October 2025 (v32.0) Release Notes as well as this guide on these changes put together by our Solutions Engineering Team: PDL Email Deliverability Improvements.
Wrapping Up
PDL’s email data can be a powerful input for outreach when used correctly. For any email-based outreach use case, always rely on recommended_personal_email and work_email, as these fields are designed to represent a person’s current contact information and are actively optimized for deliverability.
Avoid using historical email fields like emails and personal_emails for outreach, as they are intended for entity resolution and can negatively impact campaign performance and sender reputation.
Finally, remember that even high-quality email data requires good hygiene. Regular email validation, ongoing performance monitoring, and adherence to outreach best practices are essential to protecting deliverability and maximizing results. When combined with these practices, PDL’s recommended email fields provide a strong foundation for effective, scalable email outreach.
Resources
Updated about 2 hours ago