For e-commerce businesses, accurate customer contact details are essential. Here are the top five free email verification APIs for maintaining a clean email list.
Email Validation APIs
1. Abstract Email Validation and Verification
– Features: This API detects invalid email addresses, and disposable email providers, and checks for MX records. It provides a quality score reflecting the reliability of the email data.
– Free Quota: 100 API calls per month.
– Pros: Feature-rich, fast, regularly updated database, easy implementation, email address suggestions.
– Cons: Limited marketing-specific functionality. Also check email exists API
2. Zero bounce
– Features: This tool validates email addresses, provides IP geolocation, complies with GDPR and SOC 2, and allows testing on Zerobounce’s mail server.
– Free Quota: 100 API calls per month.
– Pros: Detects if addresses accept mail, scores each email, checks if domains are blacklisted, minimize hard bounces, integrates with other tools.
– Cons: Lacks embedded analytics.
3. Mailboxlayer
– Features: A simple REST API that checks email existence, detects MX records, and disposable emails, and offers single email query capabilities.
– Free Quota: 100 API calls per month.
– Pros: Provides extended usage statistics, daily updated database, and deliverability score.
– Cons: Lacks some features compared to competitors.
4. Bouncer
– Features: This tool offers high accuracy, GDPR-compliant data, and checks for email bounce rates without sending messages to spam.
– Free Quota: 100 verifications for free.
– Pros: User-friendly, can verify many catch-all emails, responsive customer care.
– Cons: Sometimes slow to respond, occasionally fails to finish checking lists.
5. Reacher
– Features: An open-source tool that uses real-time checks to connect to mail servers, minimizing bad data. It can detect catchall addresses.
– Free Quota: 50 API calls per month, free forever for personal use.
– Pros: Free for personal use, transparent open-source, easy integrations.
– Cons: Irregular updates, not feature-rich.
6. Hunter
– Features: Designed for email marketers, this tool verifies email addresses and integrates with CRMs. It provides confidence scores and checks webmail addresses like Gmail.
– Free Quota: 50 API calls per month.
– Pros: Assesses email deliverability, and uses a unique data set.
– Cons: Unclear data set update frequency.
Why is Email Validation Important?
1. Improve Bounce Rates
Without email validation, bounce rates for campaigns increase over time. Invalid addresses can flood databases, leading to higher bounce rates and poor email performance. Additionally, compliance with GDPR requires keeping personal data up-to-date to avoid hefty fines.
2. Avoid Being Marked as Spam
Maintaining accurate email lists helps prevent emails from being marked as spam. Sending to invalid addresses can lead to domain blacklisting, causing emails to end up in spam folders instead of inboxes. This can damage the sender’s reputation and reduce the effectiveness of email marketing.
3. Improve User Sign-Up Data Accuracy
Email validation tools ensure that new sign-ups meet recognized email formats, reducing errors from mistyped addresses and autocorrect. This helps keep email lists clean and maintains a good sender reputation.
