Quality contact information is critically important to any business. With an organized database of email addresses, you can establish consistent, long-term communication patterns with your clients/customers and maintain positive relationships with them well into the future.

As with most forms of text data, it’s essential to make sure email syntax is accurate right when it’s entered your system. Otherwise, you risk losing precious contact information to predictable typos and sloppy copy/paste jobs. In addition, it’s highly beneficial to get up-to-date information on each address’ email server right off the bat; that way, you can avoid bounce-backs when messaging each recipient in the future.

Thankfully, it’s quick and easy to implement a rigorous email validation workflow with Cloudmersive Email Validation APIs. We have three separate Email Validation API iterations you can choose from, each differing slightly in breadth to serve varying degrees of need. Below, we’ll take a closer look at all three of our Email Validation API iterations and discuss their respective use-cases.

Fully Validate an Email Address

As the name suggests, this iteration presents our most comprehensive, multi-step email validation solution. Full email validation entails checking each email for syntactic correctness (i.e., is the email spelled & formed properly?) and subsequently identifying the mail server in question (if any). Once those steps are complete, the final step entails contacting each address’ email server to validate whether the accounts exist - without ever sending those servers an email in the process.

This iteration returns strings identifying both the mail server (used for validation) and the email domain. In addition, each response supplies Boolean strings clearly stating whether the address, syntax, domain, or SMTP are valid, and whether the email address is a “catch-all domain”, a free email provider, or a disposable (limited use) email.

Partially Check Whether an Email Address is Valid

This iteration limits the validation process, solely identifying whether an email address’s parent domain servers are properly defined. Improperly defined servers make it difficult to contact an associated email address, and in some cases, this can even indicate malicious activity (such as email spoofing).
In its response, this API provides one (or more) strings containing the names of defined email servers associated with the input address. It also provides an initial Boolean response describing the success of the initial operation.

Validate Email Address for Syntactic Correctness Only

This third and final iteration won’t attempt to contact any external servers – rather, it will simply perform a local-only check to ensure each email address is properly formatted (e.g., containing the “@” symbol and valid domain syntax). It’s a great option to use when external server responses aren’t necessary in the immediate term.

Each response returns a Boolean identifying whether the address is valid, whether the email provider is recognized as a free email provider (google, yahoo, outlook, etc.), and whether the address is recognizable as a disposable address. In addition, the address domain is returned as a string.

For more information on our Email Validation APIs, please feel free to contact a member of our sales team.