Twilio’s SendGrid launches Email Validation API

Twilio owned SendGrid announced the launch of its new Email Validation API. The API provides real-time email address validation through the use of machine learning (ML) and mailbox provider best practices. The service is designed to improve a sender’s reputation and deliverability with mailbox providers like Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, AOL, Yahoo, Apple, and Comcast.

SendGrid stated that they’re not using the common email validation method, Broken SMTP-Handshake, because mailbox providers discourage its use. Instead, they’re relying on the scale of its dataset – SendGrid sends over 50 billion emails each month – combined with ML. In addition to ML, they are also analyzing:

• records for mistyped, inactive, non-existent, disposable, and shared email addresses
• DNS records and disposable domains
• suspected bounces and known hard bounces

SendGrid is entering a crowded email validation market. They will be competing against popular services like Hunter, and email platforms like Mailgun and NeverBounce – all of which have email validation APIs. SendGrid’s advantage is that they’re the world’s largest email Infrastructure as a service provider. If their unmatched dataset paired with ML produce accurate results, they may pose a significant threat to their competitors.

Jon Henshaw

Jon is the founder and Managing Editor of Coywolf. He is a serial entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in web development, SaaS, internet strategy, and digital marketing. Follow @henshaw