Getting Started with Recipient Validation
Send with confidence: Recipient Validation helps you remove bad email addresses before you send to them to protect your sender reputation so your emails land in the inbox. Powered by the world's largest email and analytics platform, Recipient Validation uses hundreds of millions of data points to eliminate undeliverable and toxic email addresses from your list.
You can quickly validate your email lists or integrate Recipient Validation into your sign up flow through the API.
Recipient Validation is available to all SparkPost accounts.
Validate an email list in app
Using Recipient Validation, you can quickly validate a list of email addresses. In addition to your regular list hygiene, you should be sure to verify your list when sending to recipients for the first time in a while, and when you migrate between email delivery providers.
Learn how to validate your list.
Validate a single email address in app
While in the SparkPost app, you can quickly validate a single email address for spot checking purposes.
Integrate the API
You may want to add Recipient Validation when you first collect an email address. When you validate email addresses the moment you collect them, not only are you able to block undeliverable and risky addresses from making it past your digital front door. Additionally, you are able to catch your user's typos and recommend a correction, so your user isn't confused when they never get emails from you.
Learn how to protect your forms with Recipient Validation.
Understanding the results
Each recipient validation response comes back with information to help you decide whether to use the email address, or not. Let's learn about them.
Result
The result field contains the overall status of this email. It will show the status of the email address as either valid, neutral, risky, undeliverable, or typo. You should never send to addresses classified as undeliverable.
| Result | Description |
|---|---|
valid | Data indicates a delivery and/or engagement event associated with email address. You should send to it. |
neutral | Data indicates no hard bounce, delivery, or engagement event associated with email address. |
risky | The email address is risky to send to because it is suspected of hard bouncing in the past. |
undeliverable | The email address is undeliverable because of hard bounces, syntax, invalid domain, or invalid recipient issue. |
typo | The email address may have a misspelled domain. Please see did_you_mean for our best recommendation to correct. |
Reason
Recipient Validation provides a reason field, which describes how it reached the result.
| Reason | Definition |
|---|---|
Invalid Syntax | Given email is not valid email syntax. |
Invalid Domain | The domain does not exist or is not set up to receive email. |
Invalid Recipient | Email address does not exist, according to our data. |
Did you mean?
When the response contains the did_you_mean field, it indicates there is probably a typo in the domain of the email address. An example of this is "gmial.com" instead of "gmail.com". You can pass this correction on to your user when you integrate Recipient Validation through the API or use it to correct the email address in your list.
Email address types
Disposable email address
Disposable email providers are services that create email addresses that are discarded after one use or a short period of time. People use them to avoid giving out their real email address. Our data shows that disposable email providers have engagement rates of less than 1%.
Role-based email address
Role-based email addresses represent a group or activity, like sales or abuse. They tend to engage less, and unsubscribe and complaint more. These email addresses should be avoided since they risk harming your reputation.
Free email address
Free email providers such as Gmail allow anyone to sign up for an email address. In most cases, these email addresses are not low-quality leads. However, certain businesses may consider requiring professional email addresses and not allowing free personal ones.