Email Verification API

This endpoint enables you to verify the validity of an email address. The system deeply checks whether an email is VALID, CATCH_ALL or INVALID. A verification costs 0.5 credits per email, except if the email being validated comes from our /domain-search endpoint; in that case, we only charge the user if the email is VALID.

Endpoint

POST https://api.prospeo.io/email-verifier

curl -X POST \
 -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
 -H "X-KEY: your_api_key" \
 -d '{"email": "[email protected]"}' \
 "https://api.prospeo.io/email-verifier"

Parameters

One of those two paramaters is required:

Response

A successful request will return the following information:

{
    "error": false,
    "response": {
        "free": true,
        "email": "[email protected]",
        "email_anon_id": "YYWV7XB0YT",
        "domain": "intercom.com",
        "email_status": "INVALID",
        "email_sub_status": "no_mx_records",
        "catch_all_recovery": false,
        "valid_format": true,
        "disposable": false,
        "gibberish": false,
        "type": "professional",
        "catch_all": false,
        "mx_record_present": true,
        "mx_record_main": "aspmx.l.google.com",
        "mx_record_list": [
            [
                "aspmx.l.google.com",
                10
            ],
            ...
        ],
        "smtp_provider": "Google",
        "total_emails": 194
    }
}

Please note that the email_status indicates the validity of the email:

• VALID: The email has been verified and is a valid email address.
• CATCH_ALL: The domain is a catch-all domain, meaning it accepts any email on the domain, making it impossible to verify the existence of a specific email.
• INVALID: The email doesn't exist or is invalid.

Deep catch-all detection and recovery

Our Email Verification API at Prospeo features a special tool called "Deep Catch-All Detection", which is represented by the catch_all_recovery property. This feature helps us check CATCH_ALL email addresses. These email addresses are often seen as "risky" or "unverifiable".

CATCH_ALL servers make it hard to check if a specific email exists. Prospeo’s technology changes this by working out the details of email servers to confirm if an email really exists. Simply put, even on a CATCH_ALL server, we use very intensive and deep intelligence such as response timing and other to determin the status of unverifiable emails.

While we can't get rid of all CATCH_ALL or RISKY emails, the accuracy of Propseo email verification goes way beyond other verification providers. Try it for yourself.

Error handling

Error messages follow the general structure as explained in the Error Codes section.

Rate limit

The rate limits are:

• 400 call per minute
• 10 call per second (burst allowance)

When the limit is reached, we will return a 429 error code.

Response time

On average, a request take around 2 seconds but can extend up to 10 seconds.

Given that this product performs all of its test in real-time, the response time largely depends on the SMTP server of the targeted domain/company.

We don't just make attempts to validate emails through SMTP; but we also execute much more complex operations to uncover catch-all emails, which are beyond the scope of standard SMTP-pinging approaches.

While a majority of SMTP servers have quick response times, when encountering a catch-all SMTP, we delve deeper and elsewhere on the web to verify the email. This additional investigation can increase the response time.

We recommend not setting a timeout.