Email Risk Validator, Contact Finder & Lead Cleaner

Clean email lists, extract public website contacts, and generate B2B email candidates before outreach, CRM import, signup review, or fraud prevention. This Actor combines bulk email verification, website email/phone/social extraction, B2B pattern-based email generation, MX checks, typo suggestions, and CRM-ready exports.

Fast trial paths

Start with one of these workflows to see useful output in the first run:

• Clean a messy email list: paste emailsText, keep dedupe on, and export clean-emails.json plus risky-emails.json.
• Extract contacts from company websites: paste urls or urlsText, keep extractContacts on, and review public emails, phones, social links, and contact-page evidence.
• Generate B2B candidates: paste peopleText with names and company domains, then review generated candidates by deliverability_grade, confidence, and risk.recommendation.

For repeat use, schedule the Actor after every new lead-source export from Google Maps, directories, LinkedIn tools, Apollo, HubSpot, Salesforce, Airtable, or Google Sheets.

Market-driven upgrade

A same-category scan of Apify email/contact products showed the most attractive buyer-facing features:

• Bulk email verification with syntax, MX, disposable, role, and free-provider signals
• B2B email finder workflows using first name, last name, and company domain
• Website contact finder workflows that extract public emails, phones, and social links
• Confidence scores, delivery grades, clean/risky split, and CRM export files
• Simple pricing and practical outputs for lead generation, agencies, and growth teams

This Actor now bundles those core capabilities into one lead-quality workflow.

What it does

• Validates direct email lists from structured input or pasted text
• Detects invalid syntax, disposable domains, free providers, role accounts, risky TLDs, and suspicious local parts
• Checks MX records when enabled and returns sorted MX records
• Suggests fixes for common typo domains such as gamil.com, gmial.com, and example.con
• Extracts public contact data from websites, including emails, phone numbers, and social links
• Discovers likely contact pages such as contact, about, team, support, impressum, and privacy pages
• Generates B2B email candidates from people + company domains using patterns like first.last, flast, and last.first
• Outputs risk score, recommendation, A-F deliverability grade, confidence, clean/risky split, and CRM export files

Best use cases

• Clean B2B lead lists before cold email
• Turn company websites into outreach-ready contact signals
• Generate likely business email candidates for founders, sales teams, recruiters, and agencies
• Audit newsletter subscribers before campaigns
• Filter disposable signups in SaaS onboarding workflows
• Prepare CRM contacts before HubSpot, Salesforce, Airtable, or Google Sheets imports
• Enrich Google Maps, directory, or spreadsheet exports with public contacts

Input

You can provide one or more of these inputs:

• emails - structured list of email addresses
• emailsText - raw email block separated by new lines, commas, spaces, or semicolons
• urls - company or lead websites to scan for public contacts
• urlsText - raw website block pasted from a spreadsheet or CRM export
• peopleText - one person per line for candidate generation, using First, Last, company.com or Full Name, company.com
• candidatePatterns - optional patterns such as first.last, firstlast, flast, firstl, last.first, lastf

Optional settings:

• extractContacts - enable/disable website contact extraction
• maxPagesPerUrl - number of pages to scan per website
• requestTimeoutSecs - timeout for website page requests
• strictness - use low, normal, or high risk scoring
• checkMx - check whether domains have MX records
• dedupe - remove duplicate email addresses before validation
• proxyConfiguration - optional Apify Proxy or custom proxy settings for website contact extraction

Output

Dataset records include three record types:

• email_validation - direct input or extracted email validation result
• generated_candidate - generated B2B email candidate and validation result
• contact_extraction - website-level extraction summary

Important fields include:

• email, domain, local_part, tld
• valid_syntax, disposable, role_based, free_provider, business_email, personal_email
• risky_tld, suspicious_local, mx_status, mx_records, suggestion
• risk.score, risk.label, risk.reasons, risk.recommendation
• deliverability_grade, confidence, clean
• source_url, pages_scanned, extracted_emails, phone_numbers, social_links
• person, pattern, generated_from for generated candidates

The key-value store also contains:

• SUMMARY - totals and risk breakdown
• clean-emails.json - emails recommended for use
• risky-emails.json - emails recommended for review or blocking
• generated-candidates.json - generated B2B candidates with validation signals
• extracted-contacts.json - website contact extraction summaries
• domain-summary.json - per-domain clean/risky counts
• crm-export.json - compact CRM-ready clean lead export

Example input

{
  "emails": [
    "test@gmail.com",
    "admin@mailinator.com",
    "sales@example.con",
    "info@openai.com"
  ],
  "emailsText": "support@example.com\nhello@tempmail.com",
  "urls": [
    "https://www.apify.com",
    "https://www.openai.com"
  ],
  "peopleText": "Sam, Altman, openai.com\nMelanie Perkins, canva.com",
  "candidatePatterns": [
    "first.last",
    "firstlast",
    "flast",
    "firstl",
    "last.first"
  ],
  "strictness": "normal",
  "checkMx": false,
  "dedupe": true,
  "extractContacts": true,
  "maxPagesPerUrl": 3,
  "requestTimeoutSecs": 15,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

Example output

{
  "record_type": "generated_candidate",
  "source": "email_finder",
  "email": "sam.altman@openai.com",
  "valid_syntax": true,
  "domain": "openai.com",
  "business_email": true,
  "mx_status": "found",
  "suggestion": null,
  "risk": {
    "score": 12,
    "label": "low",
    "reasons": ["generated_candidate_unconfirmed"],
    "recommendation": "verify"
  },
  "deliverability_grade": "B",
  "confidence": "medium",
  "generated_candidate": true,
  "pattern": "first.last",
  "clean": true
}

Proxy option

Website contact extraction can run directly or through the Apify input field proxyConfiguration. Direct mode is cheapest for cooperative websites. Enable Apify Proxy or custom proxies when a website blocks datacenter requests, rate-limits repeated scans, or behaves differently by country. The Actor only receives the proxy URL at runtime and does not store proxy passwords in outputs.

Pricing transparency

This Actor is configured for pay-per-event pricing. The primary paid event is each result written to the default dataset. One run can output validation rows, generated candidate rows, and website contact summary rows.

Current public pricing shown by Apify:

• Actor start: $0.0005
• Dataset result: $0.001 per dataset result

Cost examples:

• 1,000 validation results: about $1
• 10,000 validation results: about $10
• 100 websites with 3 pages each plus extracted emails: depends on extracted result count

Accuracy notes

• MX checks depend on DNS availability and can be slower than syntax-only validation.
• Website extraction only uses publicly available page content from submitted URLs.
• Generated B2B candidates are pattern guesses; use risk, deliverability_grade, confidence, and MX status before outreach.
• Disposable-domain detection uses a curated internal list and should be treated as a strong signal, not a legal/compliance guarantee.
• Free-provider detection is useful for B2B workflows but should not be treated as a reason to reject consumer users.

Recommended workflow

1. Paste lead emails, websites, or people + domains.
2. Keep dedupe enabled to avoid paying for duplicate validations.
3. Use normal strictness for outreach lists.
4. Use high strictness for fraud-prone signup workflows.
5. Export clean-emails.json or crm-export.json to your CRM or outreach tool.
6. Review generated-candidates.json before contacting generated emails.
7. Review risky-emails.json before deleting contacts permanently.