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I have a list with over 900 email addresses, but not all of them are still in use. I want to check which email addresses are still working without spamming. Does anybody know about a free API or R-library/function that verifies the existence of an email address? - Niels

Niels Raes
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  • You did a Google search for this, right? There are lots of services that claim to do this. – cory Aug 28 '18 at 13:28
  • Please note that *questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource* are [off-topic](http://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic) for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Take my suggestions as simple examples. – 000andy8484 Aug 28 '18 at 13:53
  • Yes, I did a google search, but this returned paid services or free services with a maximum of 300 queries. I had the impression that this would be a relatively easy task without having to spam all recipients. Possibly my ignorance – Niels Raes Aug 28 '18 at 14:03

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Email validation is usually done via regex (e.g. the valid.email() function in the emails package; other solutions are of course possible as the search for the "perfect" email regex is fascinating). Various services allow for free existence checking of valid email addresses with direct inputting. If you need an API to submit a large number of emails you generally must subscribe to a paid plan first. Search on Google to find many such services. For instance, you may check out email-checker.net and clicktoverify.net. Also see this SO question.

In general, you will want to pay to have email validators of a decent quality. "Free" email validators will most likely use a self-compiled email database since email providers would also charge them for email checking with a large number of validation requests. Anyways, in case this is the only option free email validators include: mailboxlayer (free up to 250 API requests/month, which may suffice, and 10$/month for more), also look the previous Email Pie implementation, and Email Verifier Lite (from Email Marketing Software, also claimed to be free). You can check out this updated comparison of email checking services.

000andy8484
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