Disposable Email Validator — Bulk Email Checker

Bulk email validator and disposable email checker for list cleaning. Check syntax, MX mail routing, disposable domains, free email providers, role accounts, and typo suggestions for up to 100,000 addresses in one run.

Use it for bulk email validation before a campaign or a signup import. It is an email verification check of the domain and the address shape. It does not open an SMTP session and does not tell you whether a specific mailbox exists.

What you get for each address

Field	Meaning
valid_syntax	Practical address syntax. Quoted local-parts and IP domains are rejected.
has_mx	The domain publishes MX records, or it has no MX but an A/AAAA record (implicit MX). true means the domain can receive mail, not that the local part is real.
mx / mx_hosts	Mail exchangers and priorities.
disposable	The domain is on a disposable-email blocklist (tens of thousands of domains).
free_provider	Consumer webmail or a major residential ISP, such as Gmail. Not a reason to block.
role_account	Shared local part such as admin, info, or noreply.
typo_suggestion	A popular provider one edit away, such as gmial.com → gmail.com.
risk	low, medium, or high.
reason	Highest-severity signal. Other flags can still be true.
block	Silent-reject recommendation. True for unusable syntax, disposable domains, subdomains of disposable domains, and domains with no mail routing. False for free providers, role accounts, typos that still resolve, and DNS failures.

Failed Worker calls are saved with worker_error and are not charged.

Why the results are fast

Addresses are sent in batches of 50, with several batches in flight. DNS lookups for the same domain are deduped by the checker. Default memory is 256 MB, which is enough for a 100,000-address list because results are written as they finish instead of being held in memory.

Input

Field	Default	What to put
Email addresses	Prefill sample of four addresses	Up to 100,000 strings. Duplicates are kept so each row gets a result.
Dataset or CSV URL	Empty	CSV, JSON, JSON lines, or an Apify dataset items URL. A column or field named email is used. Otherwise the first CSV column is used. Private Apify datasets use the token of this run.
Concurrent batches	8	1–20 batches of 50 in flight.
Retries per batch	4	Extra attempts after a timeout, HTTP 429, or HTTP 5xx, with exponential backoff. HTTP 400 and 401 are not retried.

Inline addresses and the file are combined, in that order, and the total still cannot exceed 100,000.

Dataset URL shape:

https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/DATASET_ID/items?format=json&clean=true&fields=email

Example input:

{
  "emails": ["ada@gmail.com", "a@mailinator.com", "not-an-email", "info@gmial.com"],
  "concurrency": 8
}

Output

The default dataset has one item per address. The Overview table shows the cleaning decision. Mail routing shows MX hosts. Sort by index to restore input order. A run summary is stored as the OUTPUT record in the key-value store.

block: true is still a successful check. Only a transport or Worker failure sets worker_error.

Pricing

Pay per event. You pay for each address that comes back checked, not for platform compute, and not for addresses the Worker never returned.

Event name	What it is	Price to set in Console
email-validated	One address checked	$0.00049
apify-actor-start	Platform start event. Do not charge this from the Actor.	Leave the default $0.00005

10,000 addresses are $4.90. 100,000 are $49.

That price sits under bounceverify/bounceverify-email-verifier at $0.00089 per verified email. Bounceverify is a mailbox verifier. This Actor is a disposable email checker plus MX, syntax, free-provider, role, and typo signals, and it does not probe mailboxes. The lower price matches that smaller check. Copy the numbers from .actor/pay_per_event.json into the Actor's Monetization tab. The dollar amount is not hard-coded in the source.

Set the minimum run budget (minimalMaxTotalChargeUsd) to $0.001 so a run can pay for the start event and at least one address. The Actor stops cleanly when your run hits its maximum charge: the last billed address is saved, and the rest are skipped rather than written for free.

Honest limits

• No SMTP mailbox probing. has_mx: true does not mean the inbox exists. Gmail, Outlook, and most large providers accept the recipient domain and then bounce or drop unknown users. mailbox_verification on the checker is always false.
• A typo suggestion is a hint. Show it even when block is true. A typo of a provider that still has working mail routing is not, by itself, a silent reject.
• DNS failures are not treated as a block. Retry those addresses later.
• The disposable list is a snapshot of public blocklists, not a guarantee that a brand-new throwaway domain is already listed.
• One run accepts at most 100,000 addresses. Split larger files.
• A source file larger than 20 MB is refused.

Operator setup

Set these Actor environment variables only after the checker expects a shared secret. Leave both unset until then. Set both, or neither.

Variable	Example
WORKER_AUTH_HEADER	X-Origin-Secret
WORKER_AUTH_VALUE	the shared secret

The header is sent on every checker call and is never written to the dataset or the log.

Local run

npm install
npm test
mkdir -p storage/key_value_stores/default
printf '%s\n' '{"emails":["ada@gmail.com","a@mailinator.com","not-an-email","info@gmial.com"]}' > storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json
npm start

npm start sets ACTOR_TEST_PAY_PER_EVENT=1 and ACTOR_USE_CHARGING_LOG_DATASET=1. Locally, each event is priced at $1 and appended to storage/datasets/charging_log. That log is not created on the Apify platform. OUTPUT.charged_events is the number of events the run actually billed. Publish from this folder with apify push.