Email verification API: is this address deliverable, before you send

What 100 of these actually costs

Subscription figures are provider list prices recorded in olywork.com’s own catalog grid; per-call prices are what olywork.com charges today, with $0.000 added.

What’s the best way to ask ChatGPT?

set up olywork — https://olywork.com/llms.txt

Using olywork, verify these 40 addresses before I send. Show me the price first, then give me three lists: safe to send, do not send, and unknown with the reason.

works in

Why this prompt works

Why go through olywork.com

What ChatGPT sees before it calls

olywork.com does not choose for you. It hands ChatGPT this comparison, with the price shown before any call, and ChatGPT picks. Or you tell it how: "cheapest", "most reliable", "the one that takes what I have", or a provider by name.

Which is cheapest?

Those units are not interchangeable: one call can return many results, so compare on the unit you will actually be billed in.

How do they compare?

Provider	Price	Accepts	Success rate	Verified
Kitt AI	$0.0015 per found	email, treatAliasesAsValid, realtime, customData	not yet measured	2026-09-09
MillionVerifier	$0.00178 per found	email, timeout	not yet measured	2026-09-08
Dropleads	$0.0018 per call	email	not yet measured	2026-09-15
Icypeas	$0.0019 per call	email, custom	not yet measured	2026-08-20
BounceBan	$0.004 per call	email, mode, timeout, disable_catchall_verify, url	not yet measured	2026-09-16
LimaData	$0.006 per found	email	not yet measured	2026-09-17
LeadMagic	$0.00625 per found	email	not yet measured	2026-07-31
Scrubby	$0.008 per found	email	not yet measured	2026-09-16
Tomba	$0.0089 per call	email	not yet measured	2026-09-08
Hunter	$0.0123 per call	email	not yet measured	2026-07-31
ZeroBounce	$0.0138 per found	email, ip_address, timeout	not yet measured	2026-09-17
ContactOut	free, your own account	email	not yet measured	2026-09-09
Findymail	no dollar rate published	email	not yet measured	2026-08-20

Run one

olywork call dropleads.people.email.verify --data '{"email":"nobody-olywork-20260915@example.test"}'

Swap the id for any provider above. All 14 endpoints behind this job, with their parameters and captured responses, are on the People & contact data shelf.

How these numbers are made

What people actually struggle with

Verification is the step everybody agrees on and nobody is happy with. From ~150 Reddit and X posts in August 2026, after excluding four separate vendor-astroturf clusters, these are the complaints that recur.

The price looks high for what the operation is

“zerobounce wants $65 per 10k emails. neverbounce wants $80. hunter wants $100. i built the same thing in n8n for $0.” r/n8n, 214 points

What this page can do about it: Fair complaint, and the reason we publish per-check prices side by side rather than per 10k tiers. Through olywork.com the same checks run from a fraction of a cent, and you can compare what each one charges for an inconclusive answer.

Catch-all domains are a fifth of the list and nobody knows what to do with them

“Catch-all domains are about 20% of any B2B list. Most operators throw them away because the bounce risk is real” @DeanFiacco on X

What this page can do about it: No provider resolves a true catch-all. What differs is what each one hands back: a distinct status, a probability, or a shrug. The comparison below names each provider's third bucket so you can decide once instead of per list.

An unknown result is the server refusing to answer, not the tool failing

“So the verifier returns unknown, or accept-all, or risky depending on the wording. That is not the tool failing.” r/ColdEmailAndSales

What this page can do about it: Exactly right, and it is why “which verifier is most accurate” is the wrong question. Ask instead who charges you for the shrug: one of these five does not.

Role addresses and catch-alls get misclassified

“also curious if anyone has had issues with verification tools missing role accounts or catch alls. thats been my biggest frustration.” r/Coldemailing

What this page can do about it: Hunter reports role and disposable addresses as their own statuses; the others fold them in. Whether a role address is worth keeping is genuinely unsettled, so the honest answer is to keep them separate and decide per campaign.

Doing it yourself gets your IP blocked

“SMTP probing gets your IP blocklisted and the big providers accept everything anyway.” @kumard_3 on X

What this page can do about it: Both halves are true. Cloud providers block port 25 and repeated probes from one address get you listed, which is what you are paying a provider's IP pool for. It also explains why the unknown bucket exists at all.

What actually differs

Only LeadMagic bills nothing for an inconclusive result: it charges 0.

25 credits per definitive verdict and lets “unknown” through free. Icypeas charges per address tested whether or not the answer is useful. On a list that is a fifth catch-all, that gap is the whole price difference.

Every provider names the third bucket differently.

Hunter returns accept_all, webmail, disposable and unknown as separate statuses with a score; LeadMagic returns a plain is_domain_catch_all flag plus the MX provider; Icypeas returns a certainty level. Compare the buckets, not the headline accuracy number.

Icypeas is asynchronous: you submit the address and read the verdict from a second call.

The other four answer in the same request, which matters when an agent is verifying a list interactively.

What does an email verification API actually do?

It resolves the domain's MX records and opens an SMTP conversation with the receiving server to ask whether the mailbox exists, without delivering a message. Three answers come back: the server confirms, the server denies, or the server accepts everything and tells you nothing. That last case is a catch-all domain, and no provider can resolve it, because the information does not exist on the wire.

Before you start

Does verification stop bounces?

It removes the addresses that are provably dead, which is most of the risk. It cannot catch an address that goes stale between the check and the send, or one that a security gateway rejects at delivery time. Verify close to the send, not weeks before.

What is a catch-all or accept-all domain?

A domain whose server accepts mail for every address without saying whether the mailbox exists. No verifier can resolve it. Expect roughly a fifth of a B2B list to land there.

How much does verification cost here?

A fraction of a cent per check at the provider's own rate, with $0.000 added by olywork.com. The prices and how each provider bills an inconclusive result are in the comparison below.

Can I run several verifiers over the same list?

Yes, they are all callable through one key, and heavy senders do exactly that because verifiers disagree on the ambiguous rows. Your agent chains them; olywork.com compares the options but does not route or fail over on its own.

Other jobs your agent can do

Workflows that use this job