Features

Confidence In Data Security

With ISO27001:2013 certification, robust technology and clearly defined policies and procedures, you can trust Email Hippo with your data.

See Data Privacy for more information.

> 99.9% Service Availability

Fully load balanced and automatic fail-over systems dispersed across multiple data centers in multiple regions deliver enterprise grade resilience.

See Service Reliability for more information on availability and SLA.

Multiple Response Formats

Since Version 3 of our services, we set the bar higher for email address verification integration. Whilst most of our competitors only offer JSON, Email Hippo goes further with giving our customers more protocol options:

  • JSON (industry standard modern text based interchange.)
  • XML (industry standard legacy text based interchange. Great for interop with older systems.)
  • BSON (industry standard binary based interchange. Ideal for direct sorage in mongoDB.)
  • protobuf (Google standard for binary based interchange. Ideal for applications requiring low bandwidth and high performance.)

Easy Integration

See Client Libraries to see how quick and easy it is to integrate with our services from over 19 different technologies and platforms.

Fanatical Service Quality Management (SQM)

Email Hippo operational staff obsessively monitor services to ensure the best possible uptime and coverage.

Uptime and functional correctness is actively monitored on a minute by minute basis from multiple data centers dispersed across North America, Europe and Asia.

Fast, Transparent Response Times

Every query response includes stopwatch data that shows the time taken to execute the request.

Proprietary Scoring and Risk Assessment

  • Send risk assessment scoring based on Email Hippo proprietary scoring heuristics (new)
  • Spam assessment and block-list risk scoring based on Email Hippo rules and 3rd party data sources including SpamHaus (new)
  • Overall risk scoring based on Email Hippo assessment of Send Risk combined with spam assessment (new)

Multi Factor Verification and Data Enrichment

Progressive verification using multiple verification processes including:

  • Syntax checking
  • DNS checking
  • Block-list checking (e.g. spamhaus)
  • Web infrastructure checking
  • Mailbox checking
  • Proprietary risk scoring including assessment of risks for receiving email from (spam), sending email to (send score) and overall risk assesment.

Unrivalled Coverage

With more than 5 years experience and the benefit of owning our own software stack, Email Hippo has evolved its services to provide good coverage not only of the easier B2B domains but also the more technically challenging B2C domains including:

  • Hotmail
  • AOL
  • Yandex

Spam Trap Detection

After many years R&D, Email Hippo has developed technology that can effectively identify any probable Spam Trap.

Disposable Email Address Detection

Advanced Disposable Email Address Detection detection based on Email Hippo multi-vector real-time analysis.

Features include:

  • Checking against static lists
  • Real-time detection of common DEA providers obfuscation techniques (e.g. rotating domains, IP addresses and MX servers)

Gibberish Detection

A common vector for persons wishing to remain anonymous is to register or use a pre-existing domain. Finding an available domain is not easy and as such, many (unwilling to put the effort in to finding a decent domain) instead opt for a ‘Gibberish’ domain such as `sdfre45321qaxc.com`.

Email Hippo detects gibberish in both the user and domain elements of an email address.

Unrivalled Performance

Strategic data centers in North America, Europe and Asia, aggressive caching and cloud based auto-scaling deliver outstanding performance. Typical queries are answered between 0.2 to 1.5 seconds.

Note

See Technical Specification

On Screen Reporting

Every account comes with a secure on-line portal for customers to view their current and historic usage via simple but powerful, user friendly charts and reports.

Thoughtful Versioning

Endpoints are “versioned”. This means that Email Hippo can continue to release new functionality without “breaking” existing clients committed to integrating with our systems on legacy endpoints.

What it does

Email Hippo is used to check email addresses in real-time. Not only are syntax and domain checked, but that the user mailbox is available too. This is the only way to know for sure if an email address is valid.

Additionally identified as part of the email verification process is extra information including:

How it works

Email addresses are verified using various filters and processes. As a high level overview, an email address submitted for verification goes thorough the following filters:

Syntax
A basic inspection of the syntax of the email address to see if it looks valid. Work is done only using server CPU based on simple pattern matching algorithms.
DNS A

Verifies a domain exists in DNS. Domains that do not exist in DNS cannot have mail servers or email boxes.

DNS checks are performed over the network.

DNS MX

Verify MX records using DNS. Domains that do not have MX records, have no mail servers and therefore no valid email boxes.

MX checks are performed over the network.

MailBox

Verify email boxes with SMTP checks.

Connect to mail server and perform SMTP protocol to verify if mailbox exists.

This is the deepest level of verification. It is performed over the network.