If you run any kind of email list or membership site, you need to be validating the quality of the emails you have, and checking whether they are actually deliverable or not.
Why validate for deliverability?
Because bad addresses that bounce count against you with your email service provider.
When you send email to a list, if those are bouncing as undeliverable, your service provider is going to assume you are not following rules of opt-in and are simply sending to whatever email addresses you have, instead of having some level of contact with members of the list.
OK, so how can I do that?
I’m glad you asked!
Proofy.io has an API that (among other things) allows you to check if an email address is actually deliverable or not. It’s a very simple API to use, it’s well thought out, and it’s cost-effective. They even give you 100 checks to start out with for free. You can use email checker here. That’s a direct link – no affiliate link on this.
Proofy.io allows you to save your email server reputation by removing hard bounce, risky, disposable, duplicates, and spam trap emails from your list. They have a number of options for doing that, including simply uploading your list to be validated.
But what if you’d like to screen emails in realtime?
Thankfully, Proofy has an API you can use within your own application to screen email deliverability.
Maybe you’re not all that handy with JSON or writing to APIs. That’s OK! I put together a super-simple, minimal abstraction API wrapper for Proofy’s API. The wrapper is written with WordPress plugins and applications in mind, so it’s designed for that purpose (although you could use it in any other PHP application).
As an example of how to use Proofy’s API and the API wrapper I wrote for it, I put together a very basic example of how to screen WordPress registrations for undeliverable emails (or emails that would be risky to send to). It’s a great example to get you started with Proofy’s verification API and making use of it in a practical sense.
If you have a custom need for setting up email deliverability screening in a WordPress application, you can get in touch with me for custom 1-on-1 consulting to build out a custom application or plugin.
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