One of the most successful ways to reach people who are interested in your product or service is with email marketing. However, sending emails to incorrect email addresses can result in high bounce rates and poor deliverability, resulting in a negative sender reputation. An email validator API can assist you in identifying and removing bogus or inauthentic email addresses from your mailing list to avoid this. This is because APIs examine your mailing list for mistyped email addresses, domains, or disposable email IDs to assure deliverability.
The best email validator API out there is undoubtedly mailboxlayer. Mailboxlayer provides a simple REST-based JSON API that allows you to completely inspect and validate email addresses as soon as they’re entered into your system. The mailboxlayer API is linked to a variety of constantly updated databases covering all accessible email providers. Therefore, this facilitates the separation of disposable and free email addresses from particular domains. This article will serve as a beginner’s guide to an email validator API.
How to Use Mailboxlayer as an Email Validator API?
Novices can successfully master mailboxlayer after understanding a few concepts and having basic knowledge of its features. Here are a few things that a beginner should know about API access and specification.
How Can You Get an API Access Key?
Every registered user is given a personal Access Key, which serves as a one-of-a-kind “password” for gaining access to and querying the mailboxlayer API. This key can be found on your Account Dashboard or in any interactive links in the API Documentation. You can change your Access Key at any moment from your Account Dashboard. To make an API Request, you must connect your Access Key to a legitimate API endpoint URL. Below is an example:
http://apilayer.net/api/check?access_key=YOUR ACCESS KEY.
How Can You Make an API Request?
Making an email validation request to the mailboxlayer API is relatively simple because the same API endpoint returns all verification tools. To begin checking email addresses, only one mandatory argument (email) is required in addition to the access_key parameter. Additional possible arguments can be found in the documentation.
What Should You Expect From an API Response?
All validation data from the mailboxlayer is returned in the universal and lightweight JSON format. Each API response is made up of ten individual response objects, each of which has its own set of details that can be found in the API documentation.
How to Establish HTTPS Encryption?
Users can connect to the API using industry-standard HTTPS to ensure secure and encrypted data streams. Simply add an s to the HTTP Protocol to accomplish this. This results in https://.
What Kind of API Error Codes Can You Get?
If your API request is unsuccessful, this API returns a three-digit error code, an internal error type, and a plain text “info” object with user suggestions.
Here’s one example of an error that occurred when the user failed to give an email address for validation:
{
“success”: false,
“error”: {
“code”: 210,
“type”: “no_email_address_supplied”,
“info”: “Please specify an email address. [Example: support@apilayer.com]”
}
}
What Validation Tools Does Mailboxlayer Provide?
How Does the API Check for Syntax?
The API syntax check is automated. First, the API will perform an email syntax check before requesting an email address. This allows the API to check if the email syntax is compliant with regular expression rules. Some rules regarding regular expressions include:
- 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 is not the first or last character, and also does not appear consecutively inside the email like John..Doe@example.com.
What Does The API Do When It Experiences a Typo?
The mailboxlayer API will pose an alternative email suggestion within the API result set’s did_you_mean object if it detects a potential typo in the email address domain.
What is Real-Time Verification?
The mailboxlayer API looks for MX-Records and utilizes an SMTP server to check email addresses. Simple Mail Transfer Technology (SMTP) is the protocol we all use to send and receive emails over the internet.
The mailboxlayer system determines whether the requested domain is set up to receive an email to start the real-time email verification process. This is where the MX-Records check in the API comes in handy. The API’s mx_found response object will notify you if MX-Records for the provided domain is found.
Example:
{
[…]
“mx_found”: true,
[…]
}
You can visit mailboxlayer’s official documentation to learn more about mailboxlayer’s Real-Time Verification.
How Can I Check All Incoming Email Traffic?
The real-time verification procedure of this email validator API does not conclude with a single SMTP check. Many email servers are configured to catch all incoming mail traffic, independent of the requested email address’s local portion. To solve this issue, a catch-all detection mechanism was created.
Example:
https://apilayer.net/api/check
? access_key = YOUR_ACCESS_KEY
& email = support@apilayer.com
& catch_all = 1
Due to its significant influence on the API’s response time, by default this functionality is disabled. However, by inserting the API’s catch-all option to the request URL and setting it to 1, you can enable catch-all detection.
How Do the Email Check Features Enhance the User-Experience of an Email Validator API?
Role Check
The technique of determining whether or not the requested email address is a role email address is another aspect of mailboxlayer email verification. A role email is an address that usually refers to a function (such as “support” or “postmaster”) rather than a specific person or name. This type of email address may be undesireable when delivering email campaigns because open rates are typically low.
Free Provider Check
The mailboxlayer API is connected to a regularly updated database of all available email providers, allowing it to identify free email services such as Gmail and Yahoo! The free JSON object in the API response will return true or false depending on whether the requested email address is utilizing a free service.
Disposable Provider Check
If the requested email address is utilizing a disposable email service like mailinator.com or trashmail.com, the API will additionally return a disposable JSON object containing true or false.
Do Users Get a Quality Score For a Certain Email?
The mailboxlayer API also provides a Quality Score ranging between 0 (Bad) and 1 (Good), reflecting the quality and deliverability of the requested email address.
This Quality Score is produced for each requested email address using an algorithm that learns as each email address is validated. It is based on three primary factors:
- Appearance: How similar is the local or domain part of the email address to the most valuable and best quality email addresses?
- Deliverability: Is the email syntax in general correct? Does the SMTP check reveal that the requested email address is valid?
- Background: Is the required email address registered with a free or disposable email service? Does it imply a role?
It’s impossible to draw clear borders between “worth sending to” and “not worth sending to” because the numeric quality score’s validity is dependent on the type of email approach you’re taking. To learn more about how mailboxlayer provides its Quality Score, you can visit mailboxlayer’s official documentation.
Hence, mailboxlayer is a free, simple, and powerful JSON API that validates and verifies email addresses instantly using syntax checks, typo and spelling checks, free and disposable provider filters, and more. In addition, its system is secured with 256-bit HTTPS encryption to support developers and organizations in combating fraudulent users, improving email campaign success rates, and only sending emails to legitimate consumers.
In conclusion, these features make it the best email validator API for beginners to start with.