How long does LiveAddress for Lists take?

Question

What kind of turnaround times should I expect when processing a list of addresses? Should I break my list down into several smaller lists instead of one big one?

Answer

For our LiveAddress for Lists address verification service, the turnaround time depends on the size of the file that you send us. That means, the more addresses in the file, the larger the list and the longer it will take to process. In most cases you can expect to have your list returned within a few minutes–usually about five minutes.

Here are a few example times:

• 500 addresses: 10 seconds 7 seconds
• 1,000 addresses: 15 seconds 10 seconds
• 10,000 addresses: 1 minute 33 seconds
• 100,000 addresses: 10 minutes 7 minutes
• 1,000,000 addresses: 67 minutes 45 minutes

To save you a potential headache, we do recommend breaking down larger files into more manageable chunks (10 million records per file). There are two reasons for this recommendation.

First, it's faster for you. If you put all your records in one list, our system will churn through that one list and get it done for you. However, if you break it into two lists, our system will have two different machines working on those lists so it will get finished twice as fast. Each list gets it's own process so it is dramatically faster.

Second, we're dealing with the internet here, and we all know that glitches happen. If you are uploading a list with 100 million records and your network goes out after 95 million records, you'll have to upload the whole thing again. It's much more prudent to work with smaller batches.