Capture Quality Email Addresses to Optimize Your Sending With Our New Email Validation API

Capture Quality Email Addresses to Optimize Your Sending With Our New Email Validation API

This post first appeared on the Twilio SendGrid blog.

As summer winds down, we all begin to focus on the upcoming busy email sending season and Black Friday email campaigns. So now is a great time to address your email bounce rate. If your bounce rate inches close to or above 5%, this signals to mailbox providers that you may not be keeping your email list clean and full of valid email addresses. Without a stellar reputation with mailbox providers and fully optimized inbox placement, you put your Q4 email conversion goals or end-of-year usage and engagement expectations at risk.

Lucky for you, Twilio SendGrid’s Email Validation API launched in beta at Twilio Signal and is now publicly available with generous monthly allotments for Pro and Premier Email API plans.

Integrate efficiently

Our Email Validation API is flexible so that you can integrate it to surface possible typos to submitters in a form or collect validation data after form submission.

Developers can integrate the Twilio SendGrid Email Validation API in hours, instead of days. Our comprehensive documentation includes step-by-step integration recommendations, detailed validity response definitions, and tips for how to ramp up email validation for the first time.

Harness the data

If you’ve used an email address validation or verification service in the past, you’re likely familiar with the dreaded “unknown” response category. Our Email Validation API provides you full transparency by returning a rich variety of information for each email address.

This real-time API uses machine learning, leveraging Twilio SendGrid’s massive scale, as well as record checks to detect email addresses that are mistyped, inactive, non-existent, disposable, or shared (team@, help@).

The Email Validation API also checks for:

• Proper syntax
• DNS record checks (MX/A)
• Disposable domains
• Shared role or distribution
• Suspected bounces
• Known hard bounces

Because Twilio SendGrid sends over 50 billion emails each month, we have a massive dataset from which we can train our machine learning model in order to better inform your email address validation. These validation details can be used in a customized fashion programmatically or from the SendGrid dashboard to inform the best sending decisions for your business.

For example, if you’ve been recently blacklisted, you may choose to programmatically suppress all email validation results below a higher delivery confidence score threshold like 80%.

In contrast, if your sending reputation is closer to average and you’re only hoping to tweak your bounce rate slightly, maybe you lower the score threshold for your business to closer to 50%. Or, based on your average reputation, you decide to suppress disposable email addresses, but want to continue sending to suspected role addresses while monitoring validations. All of this can be done within the Email Validation API dashboard.

Optimize your sending reputation

Mailbox providers like Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, AOL, Yahoo, Apple, and Comcast hold the keys to your recipient inboxes. We do not know all of the secrets behind their complex inboxing algorithms, but we do know that hard bounces caused by attempting to send to too many invalid email addresses are a negative indicator.

Hard bounces signal poor email collection and list hygiene practices. These negative indicators come into play when a mailbox provider is determining whether or not to place a sender’s mail in their recipients’ inboxes or spam folders. By removing invalid email addresses from your sending and decreasing your overall bounce rate, you can signal to mailbox providers that you uphold best practices in email collection and list hygiene.

Try Twilio SendGrid’s Email Validation API for free with included monthly validations on Pro and Premier Email API plans today to cross “improve email sending reputation” off of your end of the year checklist.

Lindsey Weinig is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Twilio SendGrid. She works cross-functionally to bring new products and features to market. She can be reached at lweinig [at ] twilio.com.