• by Ray Schultz , October 1, 2019

Twilio SendGrid has introduced what it says is an email validation API to help firms validate email addresses and reduce their bounce rates in real-time. 

Recently launched in beta and now publicly available, the firm’s Email Validation API returns a variety of information for each email address, correcting typos and enabling brands to avoid sending to “unknown” or invalid addresses, according to a company blog post. In addition, they can reduce bounce rates that are hovering around 5%.

The company trains its machine-learning model based on the dataset from sending over 50 billion emails per month, the blog post states. Developers can integrate the API within hours, the post says.

Firms that have recently been blacklisted can programmatically suppress all email validation results below a delivery threshold such as 80%, the company says.  

In addition, brands with average scores that hope only to tweak their bounce rate can slightly lower the score threshold to 50% and suppress disposable email addresses while continuing to send to suspect addresses while monitoring validations.

“Mailbox providers like Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, AOL, Yahoo, Apple, and Comcast hold the keys to your recipient inboxes,” the blog states. “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.”