A dead database cleaned up in 10 minutes.
Your prospect list loses 5 to 15% of its entries every year: businesses that closed, websites that migrated, expired certificates, broken redirects. outsend checks every URL, tells you which ones are alive, which are redirecting, which are dead — and hands you a clean list ready for your next campaign.
Your prospect list — even the one you carefully built six months ago — loses 5 to 15% of its entries every year. Businesses shut down, websites migrate to new domains, pages disappear, SSL certificates expire and stop serving anything. When you launch your next campaign, these "ghost" entries poison your results: you're reaching out to contacts whose companies no longer exist, collecting bounces that damage your sending domain's reputation, or working from records with zero activity for three years without realizing it.
The dead check URL feature of outsend.xyz addresses exactly this: for every URL in your list (company website, product page, outbound link), the tool verifies that it responds, that it doesn't point to an empty shell, and that it belongs to an active site. You clean in bulk, fix detected redirects, and archive dead records. Your list stays clean.
Four common causes of URL death
What silently turns a prospect record into noise in your database — ranked by frequency on a 2-year-old list.
Business closed / page gone
The company no longer exists legally, the domain wasn't renewed, or the product page was deleted. The server returns a 404 or doesn't respond at all.
DNS failure / expired domain
The domain name is no longer registered or no longer points to a server. Common causes: bankruptcy, missed renewal, or a DNS migration that was never properly completed.
Expired SSL / invalid certificate
The site is technically running, but its HTTPS certificate has expired. Modern browsers block access — the user never sees the site, the URL is effectively dead.
Migration / merger / rebranding
The company still exists, but the domain changed after an acquisition, rebrand, or migration to .com. A 301 redirect is in place — the record needs updating, not archiving.
How outsend processes each URL
Conservative pipeline: we confirm a dead URL rather than declaring it dead on the first timeout.
DNS Resolution
Does the domain resolve to an IP? If not → immediate DNS_FAIL.
HTTP HEAD
Lightweight request to retrieve status without loading the full page.
Redirect following
301/302 chain followed up to 5 hops, final URL recorded.
HTTP GET retry
If HEAD fails, retry with a full GET (some servers reject HEAD requests).
Verdict + reason
alive / redirected / dead + final HTTP code or explicit error code.
Three use cases where cleaning pays off
Annual CRM or prospect list cleanup
A sales team with 20,000 CRM entries runs an annual dead check to identify records to close (business gone) or update (domain change). Without cleanup, your CRM degrades as a reliable signal and your future campaigns get polluted.
Audit of a purchased or inherited list
You receive a list of 10,000 prospects from a colleague who's leaving, or from a partner. Before using it, a dead check filters out irrelevant entries — typically 10-25% of a list that's more than two years old.
SEO and internal link management
If you maintain a site with many external links (directory, comparison site, blog with outbound backlinks), a regular dead check identifies broken links that erode your SEO authority.
of an 18-to-24-month-old prospect list comes back "dead" on the first dead check scan — closed businesses, expired domains, broken sites. The figure climbs to 20-25% beyond 3 years.
outsend internal observation · alpha client scan cohorts
The market: single-feature tools
Solid for SEO, but a poor fit for prospecting: no re-integration into a sending pipeline, output limited to a standalone HTML/CSV report.
outsend: dead check built into the pipeline
- No separate subscription — pipelineable module from your list
- Output as columns appended to your existing CSV (
status,redirect_url,last_check) - Post-scan filtering: select only live URLs for outreach
- Free alpha · no credit cap
- Chainable with email deliverability verification and drip sending
Clean your list now
Dead check on your list, built into the outsend pipeline. Free alpha on application — no €209/year subscription to stack on top.
Frequently asked questions
Which HTTP codes are considered "dead"?
By default: any 4xx status (404, 410, 403 with no content) and persistent 5xx after retry, plus DNS failures and long timeouts (> 15 s). 301/302 redirects are categorized as "redirected" (recoverable — the record is updated with the new URL), not "dead". You decide what to do next: keep, update, or archive.
How many URLs can be scanned in one session?
In alpha, there is no fixed cap. Expect 0.3–0.8 s per URL with 8 parallel workers. For 10,000 URLs, a full scan takes 8–15 minutes depending on the average latency of the servers being checked.
Does the tool follow redirects?
Yes, up to 5 hops. The final URL is recorded in the redirect_url column of the output, along with the final status code. You can see the actual current destination of a migrated domain and update your list in one click after the scan.
What's the difference from an SEO crawler like Screaming Frog?
Screaming Frog is a full site crawler (follows all internal links, generates an on-page audit). outsend's dead check is focused on prospecting: we check the individual URLs in your prospect list, not the complete link tree of each site. Faster and more efficient when the goal is "is my list still clean?" rather than "give me a full audit of this website".
Do bot-blocking sites produce false "dead" results?
Real risk, but limited. The tool sends a credible User-Agent, handles HEAD then falls back to GET for servers that reject HEAD, and applies a generous timeout. Aggressive bot filters (Cloudflare bot fight mode at maximum) can occasionally return a 403 — the result is reported with the exact code, leaving it to you to decide whether to manually re-check 403s rather than archiving them outright.
How often should you re-run a dead check?
For an active prospect list: every 6–12 months depending on the sector. For a site with many external links (directory, blog, comparison site): quarterly. For a shared multi-user database where data quality is critical: before every major sending campaign.