InboxProduct Guide
Everything you need to go from a messy contact list to a clean, send-ready one. Building an integration instead? Jump to the API reference.
Getting started
Create an account and you land in the dashboard with 10,000 free credits, no card required. The sidebar is the whole product: Verify Email for one-off checks, Bulk Lists for cleaning whole files, Deliverability for domain audits, History for your activity and credit ledger, and API for programmatic access.
Verify one email
Open Verify Email, type an address and hit verify. InboxValid has a live SMTP conversation with the receiving mail server, so the answer reflects whether the mailbox exists right now, not what a stale database remembers. Each check costs 1 credit and takes about 2 seconds. A check that comes back unknown or blocked is not charged.
You get back a status pill plus the details behind it:
| Status | What to do with it |
|---|---|
| valid | Safe to send |
| invalid | Remove it; it will bounce |
| invalid_syntax | The address is not written as a valid email address, for example a missing @ or a character that cannot be in one. Do not send to it: fix the typo or drop the row. |
| catch_all | The domain accepts everything, so the mailbox can't be confirmed. Send cautiously. |
| risky | Deliverable but flagged, for example a role address like info@. Decide per campaign. |
| disposable | A throwaway inbox. Remove it from any long-term list. |
| unknown | The server wouldn't give a clear answer (greylisting and similar). Re-verify later. |
| blocked | Not checked on purpose. The domain's mail sits behind a security gateway that does not give reliable answers to verification (reason behind_gateway). Final, and not charged. Treat it like an address you have not verified and decide by your own risk: keep it for one to one mail you would send anyway, and leave it out of bulk sends where a bounce would hurt you. |
The trust score (0 to 100, higher is safer) combines the SMTP outcome with flags like role account, free provider and catch-all, so you can set your own cutoff instead of trusting a single label.
Clean a bulk list
Open Bulk Lists. You can paste addresses directly or upload a file: CSV, Excel (.xlsx) or JSON, up to 1,000,000 emails per job. Pasted lists are capped at 50,000 addresses; upload a file for more. For files, InboxValid auto-detects which column holds the emails; click a different column header in the preview if it guessed wrong. Duplicates and non-email values are dropped before anything is charged.
Credits are held upfront, 1 per email, and anything unused is refunded when the job settles. While the job runs you see a live progress bar and counters. When it finishes you get:
Metrics and charts. Per-status counts with percentages and a breakdown donut so you can judge list quality at a glance, for example "82% valid, 9% invalid, 6% catch-all".
Email search. Rather than scrolling thousands of rows, type any part of an address to look up its exact result, status, trust score and reason.
CSV export. Download all results, or filter the export to one status. "Valid only" gives you a send-ready file for your campaign tool.
Deliverability audits
Clean lists only matter if your own domain is set up to deliver. Open Deliverability, enter a sending domain and InboxValid grades it (A to F) across 8 checks: MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, PTR, DNSBL blocklist listing, MTA-STS and BIMI. Each failing check comes with a concrete recommendation, and you get a verdict on whether the domain passes the Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft bulk-sender requirements. An audit costs 5 credits.
Spam-trap risk
A mailbox can accept mail and still be unsafe for a campaign. Read the spam-trap guide to understand pristine, recycled, typo and domain traps, and how InboxValid returns trap evidence in trap_kind and trap_confidence(typo traps and addresses on InboxValid's spam-trap list are detected today).
Credits & billing
| Action | Cost |
|---|---|
| Verify one email | 1 credit |
| Bulk job | 1 credit per email, held upfront, unused refunded when the job settles |
| Deliverability audit | 5 credits |
There are three ways to hold credits, and you are on exactly one at a time. Free grants its credits once, when you sign up, and never tops them up. A subscription grants its allowance every cycle and rolls the unused part into the next one, for as long as it runs; cancel and the rolled-over balance goes with it. Credit packs are bought outright under Buy Credits (via Razorpay: international cards for USD, or UPI, cards and netbanking for INR) and are valid for 12 months from purchase, with volume tiers lowering the per-credit price automatically. A subscription and credit packs cannot run at the same time, so packs are unavailable while a subscription is active.
Plan credits are always spent before bought ones, so a plan ending never takes credits you paid for. History keeps the full ledger: every grant, charge, refund and expiry with the balance after each movement, plus an activity trail of everything done on the account.
API keys
The API page in the dashboard manages your keys and includes a quickstart. Create a key, copy it when shown (it appears exactly once) and pass it as a bearer token:
Authorization: Bearer iv_live_...Everything the dashboard does is available over the API: verify at signup, clean lists from your CRM, watch job progress over SSE and export results as CSV. See the API reference for every endpoint with request and response examples.
10,000 free credits cleans a real list, not a demo.