# Email lookup: will that address actually accept mail Every bounce hurts your sender reputation, and every typo on a signup form is a customer who never gets your email. Bird's email lookup answers the question before any of that happens: will this address accept mail, how confident is that answer, and does the address look like a role, disposable, or misspelled one? In this video we run lookups in the dashboard — a good address, a dead mailbox, a risky one, and a typo — then make the exact same call over the API. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVP5YC-E0gM (5:59) ## What we cover - Checking whether an address can actually receive mail - Reading a lookup's risk and disposability flags - Using a lookup before you send, not after ## Transcript _Auto-generated from the video._ Hey, and welcome back to another video. Today we're going to be looking at our email lookup service, formerly known as email validation. This will allow you to look up email addresses you'll be sending to and actually check the validity. This is especially helpful because every bounce will hurt your sender reputation and and every typo on your sign-up form is actually a customer that you already lost due to missing marketing emails or even worse order confirmation emails that they'll just be waiting for but that will never actually arrive. An email lookup will answer all of these questions before any of that will happen. Basically, will this email address actually accept any email? Now, there's a few ways that we can do an email validation. Um we're going to start off in the dashboard and we're going to go over to lookup. And then here you'll see that we have two lookup services, phone lookup, which we've got a separate video, and we're going to navigate to our email lookup. Now, from the dashboard we're able to run individual lookups just to kind of see what the information actually is and how we can start using it. Now, let's start off with a simple one. I'm going to give my own email address. We can actually see that this is an unconfirmed email address. Basically meaning that we don't have sufficient information on the specific email to really give it validity. We can see that the delivery confidence is about 53, meaning that we assume that we can deliver but there's no actual foundation for this email address that we can use. However, we have confirmed that the domain is actually a valid domain. Now, if you remove the demo sequence, we can immediately see that because there's more traffic on my personal mail, the validity of the email is all of a sudden valid. The delivery confidence is therefore 69. This also includes the possibilities of emails ending up in spam, um or getting uh rejected by the server. Um now there's a few more things that we can actually do besides just validating an individual email. So, let's say that we're actually going to be triggering our support at bird.com. Well, all of the sudden we can see that this is risky. The reason why this is risky is because this is now a role address. We can see that the additional flag is now showing up because support isn't an individual user, it's most likely a subgroup or a uh larger collab um connection of multiple people accessing that inbox. Therefore, for you as a marketer, these types of addresses are risky to actually start sending to because the risk of eventually them flagging them as uh spam or unwanted uh marketing material is larger. Now, this can even go a bit further, so we can actually go to a new email@gmail.com. But let's misspell Gmail. We can actually immediately see that there is more information available, possible typo. So, this information actually knows that the gmail.com is a large domain that is uh used quite a lot, and because gma is very close to such a domain, we also flag this as a possible typo. The delivery confidence for this specific email address is therefore very small, even though that gma.com is a valid domain. And then we actually pass over a did you mean value, giving you the option to start using this on your sign up forms to actually reduce the risk of getting typos on um most used email domains. Now, if we then actually make this a Gmail address, and we look that one up specifically, we see that a new flag actually shows up free provider. Now, this is basically for all of the free email providers, giving you clear insights in terms of what the type of customers are that sign up for you. Now, if you are a B2C uh business, this is of course very normal, you have a lot of um consumer bases who use free providers. However, if you are a B2B business, this might of course not necessarily be as important for you. So, for example, for a demo request form, you might want to filter out specific Gmail addresses. Now, you can then start using the email validation to help you identify any of these specific flags to better improve the quality of your sign-up flows for your marketing email. Now, secondary, beyond the dashboard, we actually can integrate this on a larger scale using our API. So, if you navigate to our API documentation, we go to lookup, we can see that we also have a create email address lookup post call, which is a pretty straightforward call. It's actually just a single string where we just pass over the email address on our lookup endpoint, and you'll see that the information automatically returns. We can see the validity, we can see the actual result, valid or risky or misspelled. Um, we have that delivery confidence and then any of the flags that are available that will help you make a decision what to do with this email. Now, all of this together can help you to better improve your actual sending because you're not going to be sending to invalid domains. It might also help you to improve your sign-up flows to make sure that any misspelled issues that your customers might have actually get taken care of upon the sign-up process instead of at a later stage when they identify it themselves. Now, here you can see a few of the additional um, information that will come back. So, you we've got that email, we've got the validity, we've got any of the results. Um, and in certain occasions, there might be some reasoning and again that did you mean string to make sure that if a typo has happened, it can be taken care of automatically. It's as simple as that. So, have a look at our API documentation. We've got more guides on lookup services online. If you've got any specific questions, our support team is more than happy to assist. But for now, as always, I want to thank you for watching. I want to wish you happy sending, and I'll see you in the next one. ## More Lookup guides - [Phone number lookup: check a number before you send](/nl-nl/learn/lookup/lookup-phone) — 4:51 ## Resources - [Documentation](/nl-nl/documentatie) - [Learn more about Lookup](/nl-nl/producten/lookup)