# One field to decide an address on.

Send one address and get one verdict: valid, neutral, risky, undeliverable, or typo. Alongside it, a confidence score from 0 to 100, the flags that say what kind of address it is, and the address a misspelling looks like it was meant to be. One request, no list to upload and no job to poll.

## A verdict you can branch on.

## Not a percentage you have to pick a threshold for.

Email address lookup is one of the two operations in the Bird Lookup API. The field to write your logic against is result, because it already reduces syntax, domain, mailbox, and reputation checks to five outcomes. delivery_confidence is there for the cases where you want to grade rather than gate, for example holding a risky signup for review instead of refusing it. The address you send is the address that comes back: the local part is case-sensitive and is not lowercased, and the display-name form is rejected rather than parsed.

## Six fields, and what each is for.

Every one of them arrives with the same single request.

## Five outcomes, four things to do.

Refuse the undeliverable ones, offer the correction on a typo, hold a risky address for review, and accept the rest. That is the whole integration, and it fits in the submit handler of the form that collects the address.

## What it costs, and what it is not.

One address per request, and every verdict bills, undeliverable included, because reaching that verdict is the work. There is no batch form and no list upload. A retry carrying the same Idempotency-Key replays the verdict you already paid for. Lookup is also not a suppression list: it tells you what an address looks like before you send, while suppression records what happened after you did, and a healthy sending setup uses both.

## Go deeper in the docs.

Look up an email address walks the request and every field in the response. The Lookup overview covers both operations in one page, rate limits documents the lookup group, and idempotency explains what a replayed verdict costs.

## Check an address before it reaches your list.

One call in your signup handler keeps the bounces, the throwaway accounts, and the misspellings out of the database.