Email address verification API is a service that enables businesses to validate email addresses. It helps prevent wasted time and money on undeliverable emails by ensuring that the emails are valid, authentic and not being used for spam or phishing purposes. The best email address validation APIs provide a robust and comprehensive checking process that uses multiple factors to verify the integrity of an email address. These factors include the MX records, SMTP verification, blacklist checks and a custom local-part grammar check. An email address that is invalid or not being used by the intended recipient is considered a hard bounce and should be removed from an email list.

Email addresses become stale over time due to a variety of reasons. A common reason is that the person moves on to a different company or email provider. A stale email database wastes time and resources because campaigns to these addresses are less likely to generate sales or qualified leads. Invalid or low-quality email addresses also hurt a business’s sender reputation and inbox placement because they are often flagged as spam by ISPs.

A stale database can also negatively impact a business’s email address verification API revenue because it is expensive to purchase email lists and send to them. A good email address verification tool will check the email addresses in real time to prevent half-hearted subscribers from clogging up the database. The system will ping the domain to see if it is set up to accept email and also connects with the mail server over SMTP (to simulate sending a message) to make sure the mailbox really exists.

In addition, an email verifier will scan the DNS records to identify and remove the MX (mail exchange) record for a given domain. The system will also check the email address against various blacklists such as URI DNSBL and spam traps to eliminate any potential risk of being sent to spam traps and bots. The system will also conduct a custom local-part grammar check to ensure that the email address is properly formatted.

An effective email verification tool will also scan the IP address to see if it is on any blacklists. If an IP address is listed on any blacklists, it will be marked as a spam trap and may be directed to the junk folder or blocked by ISPs.

An email address verification tool should also have a dashboard that displays reports on the status and health of an individual email address in a real-time. The dashboard should display multiple graphs displaying the status of an email address over a specific period of time. It should also display the status and sub-status code of an individual email address to enable marketers to pinpoint any issues with a particular email address. ZeroBounce offers a comprehensive dashboard that covers 30+ status and sub-status codes. This dashboard is accessible via industry-standard HTTPS and can be used by both businesses and developers to keep track of the health of their email address databases.