Email List & Sender Domain Deliverability Auditor

Most email verifiers only check the list you're sending to. This one also checks the domain you're sending from — the part that's actually decided whether your last campaign landed in the inbox or the spam folder.

Two checks, one Actor, both using standard public DNS lookups only — no SMTP probing of individual mailboxes.

1. Recipient list hygiene

For each email address: syntax validity, whether the domain has a working mail server (MX record), and flags for disposable/temporary domains, free providers, and role-based addresses (info@, sales@, etc.).

2. Sender domain deliverability audit

For each domain you send from: SPF record (and whether it actually rejects unauthorized senders), DKIM signing (checked against common selector names used by major email platforms), and DMARC policy. This is the exact configuration Google and Yahoo have required for bulk senders since 2024 — and the part a recipient-only verifier can't tell you anything about.

Why no SMTP probing?

Several email verifiers offer an "SMTP handshake" mode that connects to a mail server and asks whether a specific mailbox exists. In practice this is unreliable — Gmail and Outlook both return ambiguous responses specifically to prevent this kind of enumeration — and running it at volume against mail servers you don't own is the kind of traffic pattern that gets flagged as abuse. This Actor skips it entirely and relies only on DNS lookups: the same public, standard queries any mail server performs before it will even attempt to send a message.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
emails	array of strings	4 example addresses	Recipient addresses to check. Leave empty to skip.
senderDomains	array of strings	["gmail.com", "outlook.com"]	Domains to audit for SPF/DKIM/DMARC. Leave empty to skip.
dnsTimeoutMs	integer	8000	Timeout per individual DNS query.

Use either field alone, or both in the same run.

Output

Email results (default dataset):

{
  "email": "sales@example.com",
  "syntaxValid": true,
  "domain": "example.com",
  "mxFound": true,
  "mxRecords": ["mail.example.com"],
  "isDisposable": false,
  "isFreeProvider": false,
  "isRoleAccount": true,
  "status": "risky",
  "reasons": ["Role-based address (not a named individual)"],
  "checkedAt": "2026-09-14T10:00:00.000Z"
}

Domain audit results (DOMAIN-AUDITS dataset — open it from the run's Storage tab):

{
  "domain": "example.com",
  "spf": { "found": true, "record": "v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com -all", "hasHardFail": true, "hasSoftFail": false },
  "dkim": { "found": true, "selectorsChecked": 15, "selectorsFound": ["google"] },
  "dmarc": { "found": true, "record": "v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; ...", "policy": "quarantine" },
  "deliverabilityScore": 90,
  "recommendations": [],
  "checkedAt": "2026-09-14T10:00:00.000Z"
}

Pricing

Pay-per-event:

• A small flat fee per run.
• Per email checked — cheap, since it's a lightweight lookup.
• Per domain audited — priced higher, since it runs several DNS queries and produces an actionable compliance report.

Limitations

• Disposable-domain and free-provider lists are curated, not exhaustive. New disposable-email services appear constantly; treat isDisposable: false as "not on our list," not a guarantee.
• DKIM detection is best-effort. The true DKIM selector a domain uses isn't discoverable from DNS alone unless you already know it. This Actor checks ~15 selector names commonly used by major email platforms (Google Workspace, Sendgrid, Mailgun, Mandrill, Zoho, etc.). A dkim.found: false result means none of those common selectors resolved — it does not prove DKIM isn't configured under a custom selector name.
• No SMTP-level checks (by design — see above). This means a syntactically valid address at a domain with a working mail server could still bounce if that specific mailbox doesn't exist; this Actor tells you the address is plausible, not that it's guaranteed to be live.

API usage example

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_API_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("YOUR_USERNAME/email-deliverability-auditor").call(run_input={
    "emails": ["prospect@example.com"],
    "senderDomains": ["yourcompany.com"],
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["email"], "-", item["status"])