Every email you send through PushMail is validated before it reaches SendGrid. No add-on, no per-validation fee, no Pro plan requirement. This isn't a marketing decision — it's an engineering one. Bad addresses waste money and destroy sender reputation.
What we check
Every address goes through four layers of validation at send time:
Syntax validation — We reject malformed addresses before they go anywhere. Missing @ signs, spaces, double dots, and other RFC 5321 violations are caught immediately.
MX record lookup with domain caching — We resolve the MX records for the recipient's domain to confirm it can actually receive email. Results are cached in KV for 24 hours so we're not hammering DNS on every send. If a domain has no MX records, the email is rejected.
Disposable domain detection — We maintain a list of known disposable email providers (Guerrilla Mail, Mailinator, Tempail, and hundreds of others). Addresses on these domains are rejected. These addresses inflate your contact list and never convert.
Global bounce list — When an address hard-bounces through any PushMail sender, it's added to a shared suppression list. We check this list on every send. If an address has already bounced, we skip it. This protects every sender on the platform from known-bad addresses.
Why this matters for your sender reputation
Email reputation is fragile. ISPs track your bounce rate, and if it exceeds ~2%, they start throttling or blocking your emails. A single bad import — uploading a stale CSV with hundreds of dead addresses — can tank your deliverability for weeks.
By validating at send time, we catch problems before they become bounces. Your SendGrid reputation stays clean, and your emails keep landing in inboxes.
How other ESPs handle validation
Most don't. Here's what you get elsewhere:
- SendGrid — Email validation is a paid add-on, available only on Pro plans ($89.95+/month). You get 2,500 validations included, then pay per validation. It's a separate API call — not integrated into sending.
- Mailchimp — No real-time validation. They rely on double opt-in and post-send bounce handling.
- Postmark — No validation service. They reject high bounce rates after the fact by suspending your account.
- Amazon SES — No built-in validation. You're expected to integrate a third-party service.
What this saves you
For a typical sender doing 50,000 emails/month with a 3% invalid rate:
- 1,500 bounces avoided per month
- Bounce rate stays under 0.5% instead of 3%+
- $0 spent on validation — SendGrid would charge for this at scale
- No account suspensions from sudden bounce spikes after imports
Every PushMail plan includes this. There's nothing to enable, nothing to configure. It just works.