Contacts: Validate an Email Address

Use this action to check that an email address is formatted correctly, free of common spelling mistakes, and verified by a mail server.

Use case

This action is helpful when sending a survey or update to a large list on contacts to avoid getting email bounces.

This action can be used effectively as a subprocess if you have emails stored in a spreadsheet or a data table by using the Excel: Start Process for Each Row or Tables: Start Workflow for Each Row actions

How to configure this action

Fields for this action

• Email address

  • The email address to validate, as text or in {field-name} format

• Mailbox verification

  • Provides option to verify address with server. Select True or False from the drop down.
    • Select True to attempt to verify that the address exists by contacting the mail server.
    • Leave blank or select False to skip contacting the mail server.
  • ✅   Heads-up: Mailbox verification can significantly increase the time it takes for this action to complete.

• Output Field Prefix

  • To help keep output fields organized, choose an output field prefix to add to the beginning of each output field name as this action may output more than one field.
  • The step’s name is used as the prefix by default.

What will this output?

This action may generate multiple fields. To help keep output fields organized, the prefix above will be added to the beginning of each of the output field names, separated by two dashes. Each field will result as:{{output-field-prefix--output-field}}. Learn more

Output fields for this action

• Address

  • The Email address that was used

• Did you mean

  • Provides a suggested correction to the email address when appropriate

• Is disposable address

  • Returns true if the address is disposable

• Is role address

  • Returns true if the address is for a team, such as sales@ or product@

• Is valid

  • Returns true if an email address passes grammar and formatting checks and a valid SMTP server is present for the address. A valid address may still be a disposable or role address.

• Mailbox verification

  • Returns true if the email is valid
  • Returns false if the email was invalid
  • Returns unknown if the SMTP request could not be completed or the recipient’s mail provider does not support mailbox verification.

• Parts - display name

  • Provides a display name if one is attached to the address, blank if none

• Parts - domain

  • Provides the domain of the address

• Parts - local part

  • Provides the section of the address before the domain (e.g., sales for sales@pagerduty.com)

• Reason invalid

  • Provides the reason the email was marked as invalid, when invalid. These are returned as 3 digit status codes like 2.0.0, 2.1.5, or 4.7.1. When you validate an email address, the mail server itself responds with a specific status code. The same status code may mean different things depending on the mail server.

  • For a summary of different status code types and what they may mean, see List of possible status codes

Get help with a problem or question

If something’s not working as expected, or you’re looking for suggestions, check through the options below.