What an "invalid" email verification result means

invalid

The address cannot receive mail. Sending to it will bounce.

What it means

Invalid means one of the checks failed in a way that is not temporary: the address is badly written, its domain does not exist or cannot receive mail, or the mail server said the mailbox does not exist.

The reason field tells you which check failed. A message sent to an invalid address comes back as a hard bounce, and a high hard bounce rate is one of the signals mailbox providers use to send your campaigns to spam or block them.

Reasons that lead to it

• rejected_email: the server said the mailbox does not exist.
• invalid_email: the address is not written as a valid email address.
• invalid_domain: the domain does not exist.
• no_mx_record or invalid_mx_record: the domain has no working mail server.
• unavailable_smtp: the domain's mail server is not available for mail.

What to do

• Do not send to it. Remove it from the list or move it to a suppression list, so it is not imported again.
• Check did_you_mean first: if it has a suggestion (for example gmail.com for gmial.com), correct the address instead of deleting the contact.
• In a signup form, show a message and let the person fix the address before the form is submitted.

Example API response

{
    "email": "jane.doe@example.com",
    "result": "invalid",
    "reason": "rejected_email",
    "disposable": false,
    "accept_all": false,
    "role": false,
    "free": false,
    "user": "jane.doe",
    "domain": "example.com",
    "mx_record": "mx1.example.com",
    "mx_domain": "example.com",
    "safe_to_send": false,
    "did_you_mean": "",
    "success": true,
    "message": "Processing time: 812 ms",
    "http_code": "200"
}

Try it without an account: the API has a free sandbox key, eev_sandbox_key, that returns fixed answers for test addresses such as valid@, invalid@, unknown@ and catchall@sandbox.easyemailverification.com.

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