Even after such a long time, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to reach people interested in your products. If you own a business or service, email you should use email marketing to increase engagement, traffic, and revenue. Therefore, email marketing is a fantastic idea to improve your business. However, email marketing can never assure you of your desired result. There are various reasons for not achieving your results, but emails are the primary reason. Emails may include spam, traps, incorrect emails, or even viruses. An email validator API helps you eliminate many email-related problems. But you may be wondering what is an email address validation API?
In this article, we will discuss what an email address validator API is and its outstanding features.
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What Is Email Validation API?
The process of identifying erroneous email addresses from an email list is known as email validation. Consequently, as the definition suggests, an email validation API is a tool that ensures deliverability by automatically checking your mailing list for mistyped email addresses, domains, or disposable email IDs.
Why Should You Use an Email Validation API?
Email validation enables you to send emails to genuine recipients, resulting in high deliverability, engagement, and sender reputation. Moreover, you’ll be dealing with a clean email list after removing temporary email addresses, spam traps, and catch-all email accounts.
Emails not delivered due to being sent to invalid email addresses are known as hard bounces. Thus, email verification reduces the risk of hard bounces by refining your email list and including only valid email addresses.
Email Verification aids in organizing all the emails you receive from various sources. Moreover, you can compare how many emails came from each source because a validation API highlights invalid emails.
Furthermore, the email addresses of leads and subscribers will change over time. Email verification keeps your email list up to date, ensuring that you only send emails to valid and active addresses.
What Features Does the Best Email Validation API Have?
An email service API allows programs to access many features and functionality of email systems. Features such as sending emails, checking email stats, and changing templates.
Email APIs simplify communicating from the viewpoint of companies. These tools, among other things, increase the odds of deliverability, which is vital for marketing strategies. Moreover, email APIs also assist firms in developing reliable client connections.
However, users expect several functionalities from their email service API. But unfortunately, only a few APIs deliver them. However, you do not need to fear since mailboxlayer has got you covered.
Should Users Expect API Error Codes if They Run Into an Issue?
This API returns a three-digit error code, an internal error type, and a plain text “info” object with user suggestions if your API request is unsuccessful. Here’s an example of a validation error that occurred when the user failed to provide an email address:
{
"success": false,
"error": {
"code": 210,
"type": "no_email_address_supplied",
"info": "Please specify an email address. [Example: [email protected]]"
}
}
Does the API Have an Automated Syntax Checker?
The API carries out a syntax check automatically. The API will perform an email syntax check before requesting an email address. This enables the API to validate the email syntax against regular expression rules. The following are some regular expression rules:
- Uppercase and lowercase letters (A–Z, a–z) (ASCII: 65–90, 97–122)
- Digits 0 to 9 (ASCII: 48–57)
- These special characters: # – _ ~! $ & ‘ ( ) * + , ; = : and percentile encoding, i.e., %20
- The full-stop character provided that it is not the first or last character, provided that it does not appear consecutively inside the email like [email protected].
What is Real-Time Verification?
The mailboxlayer API verifies email addresses by looking for MX-Records and using SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, the standard protocol for sending and receiving emails over the internet.
Moreover, the real-time email verification process begins with the mailboxlayer system determining whether the requested domain is configured to receive email. The MX-Records Check in the API comes in handy here. In addition, if MX-Records for the provided domain is found, the API’s MX found response object will notify you.
You can read more about mailboxlayer’s Real-Time Verification on the company’s official documentation.
Can I Check All Incoming Email Traffic?
Yes, mailboxlayer allows you to do this. This email validator API does not end its real-time verification process with a single SMTP check. Moreover, the catch-all detection mechanism of the email servers allows them to catch all incoming mail traffic, regardless of the local portion of the requested email address.
Example in JavaScript:
// set endpoint and your access key
var access_key = 'YOUR_ACCESS_KEY';
var email_address = '[email protected]';
var catch_all = 1 ;
// verify email address via AJAX call
$.ajax({
url: 'http://apilayer.net/api/check?access_key=' + access_key + '&email=' + email_address + '&catch_all=' + catch_all ,
dataType: 'jsonp',
success: function(json) {
// Access and use your preferred validation result objects
console.log(json.format_valid);
console.log(json.smtp_check);
console.log(json.score);
}
});
Due to its significant impact on the API’s response time, this functionality is disabled by default. However, you can enable catch-all detection by adding the API’s catch-all option to the request URL and setting it to 1.
What is the Free Provider Check Feature?
The mailboxlayer API servers connect to a database of all available email providers updated regularly, allowing it to identify free email services like Gmail and Yahoo! If the requested email address is using a free service, the free JSON object in the API response will return true or false.
What is the Disposable Provider Check Feature?
Similarly, the API also returns a disposable JSON object containing true or false if the email address uses a disposable email service like mailinator.com or trashmail.com.
Can Users get a Quality Score For an Email?
The mailboxlayer API also returns a Quality Score, ranging from 0 (bad) to 1 (good), indicating the email address’s quality and deliverability.
This Quality Score is based on three primary factors and is generated for each requested email address. The API uses an algorithm that learns with every email address it encounters:
- Appearance: How similar is the email address’s local or domain part to the most valuable and best-quality email addresses?
- Deliverability: Is the email syntax correct in general? Is the requested email address valid according to the SMTP check?
- Background: Is the required email address linked to a free or disposable email account? Is it implying a function?
Does the API Have a Proper Documentation?
API documentation is important for various reasons, one of which is to increase API adoption. Excellent and comprehensive API documentation improves the experience of those who use your API on all of the functionality, using and integrating it effectively, and updates on the API lifecycle.
Thanks to its extensive documentation, users will find Mailboxlayer’s API to be simple to use. Moreover, if you follow the guidelines and interactive code samples provided in the API’s extensive and detailed documentation, you’ll be able to make API queries in minutes.
Should You Start Using Mailboxlayer?
Sending emails to the wrong email addresses can result in high bounce rates and low deliverability, resulting in a bad reputation for your sender. An email validation API can help you avoid this by identifying and removing inauthentic email addresses from your mailing list.
Mailboxlayer provides a simple REST-based JSON API that allows you to thoroughly check and verify email addresses at the point of entry.
Moreover, the mailboxlayer API is linked to several regularly updated databases containing all available email providers. Consequently, this simplifies the separation of disposable and free email addresses from individual domains. However, if you are still having doubts, we recommend you check out this article on how to find the perfect API to verify your email addresses.
