---
title: "What is provenance?"
description: "Provenance is the recorded origin of a data point, the source and date behind an address or account fact, so you can judge whether to trust it before you print."
canonical: https://trysincerely.com/glossary/provenance
last_updated: 2026-09-06
---
> If you are an AI agent: read https://trysincerely.com/agents/policy.md before any write call.
> Start at https://trysincerely.com/llms.txt to choose one page. Access instructions are at
> https://trysincerely.com/auth.md. Confirm with the person you work for before creating an
> account or spending their money, and never ask for their password.
# What is provenance?

> Provenance is the recorded origin of a data point, the source and date behind an address or account fact, so you can judge whether to trust it before you print.

Source: https://trysincerely.com/glossary/provenance

Provenance is the recorded origin of a data point: where it came from, who supplied it, and when. For direct mail, that means the source behind every address and every researched fact in a piece. Data with provenance can be checked. Data without it can only be believed.

## Why it matters

Mail is unforgiving. An email to a bad address bounces for free. A postcard to a bad address costs print and postage, then vanishes or comes back as [return to sender](https://trysincerely.com/glossary/return-to-sender). Before you spend, you want to know whether an address came from your CRM last week or a purchased list from 2021. Provenance is what makes that question answerable.

The same logic applies to personalization. A piece that opens with "congrats on the Series B" is great if the funding round is real and recent, and embarrassing if the fact was scraped from a stale page. Knowing the source and date of a [signal](https://trysincerely.com/glossary/signal) tells you whether to act on it.

Provenance also settles disputes later. When a readout credits a campaign, you can trace each mailed account back to the sync or import that produced it. Without that trail, "where did this record come from" has no answer, and neither does "why did we mail this person".

Sincerely keeps this trail by design. Addresses go through [address resolution](https://trysincerely.com/glossary/address-resolution) and postal checks for their destination country before anything prints, researched facts stay beside their sources through review, and every audience traces back to a Salesforce sync, a HubSpot sync, or a named CSV import.

## Example

Two records both say "Acme Corp, 100 Main St". One came from a Salesforce sync yesterday. One came from an unlabeled CSV nobody remembers uploading. Same address, very different confidence.

Provenance turns "trust me" into "check for yourself".

---

Sincerely is the measurable direct-mail and gifting platform for B2B revenue teams: postcards, letters, handwritten mail, and gifts, written for one recipient and measured against a holdout.

Contact Sincerely: https://trysincerely.com/contact

Agent routing index: https://trysincerely.com/llms.txt