Email List Cleaner: Bulk Email Verify, Keep Qualified Emails on the Apify Store →

How to clean an email list and keep only the sendable emails

Tutorial article (800–1500 words) for the Apify blog guest program, dev.to, Medium, Hashnode. The owner publishes it and records the URL in brief.json → marketing.links.

You exported 4,000 addresses from a scraper, a webinar or an old CRM, and the campaign is due on Monday. Send it as it is and the bounce rate decides whether your domain still reaches inboxes next month. This is how to turn that file into the emails worth sending in about ten minutes, with Email List Cleaner: Bulk Email Verify, Keep Qualified Emails on Apify.

The problem

A raw list is three lists in one: addresses that will bounce (typos, dead domains, throw-away inboxes), addresses that are deliverable but wrong for the campaign (info@, sales@, a free-mail address on a B2B offer), and the ones you actually want. Most verifiers bill every row, so you pay for the first group, and then you still filter the second group by hand: opening company sites, judging the title, deciding whether jordan.lee@gmail.com is a prospect. At about two minutes a row that is hours of work per hundred emails, every week.

Step by step

  1. Open the Actor and click Try it. The form is pre-filled with seven sample addresses; four qualify and three are dropped for free (a disposable domain, a catch-all, a role mailbox). Nothing is charged, and on a plan without model access the demo shows labelled sample AI verdicts.
  2. Give it your list. Paste addresses into "Emails to qualify", or paste a CSV / Google Sheet link into "Or your list as a CSV link". The address column is found for you and every other column (company, title, website) comes along and reaches the AI. Describe your ideal recipient in one sentence: *"VPs and heads of growth at B2B SaaS companies with 20–500 employees"*.
  3. Know the bill first (optional). Switch on "Estimate the bill only". The run counts your list and prints the worst case and the typical bill for AI on and off. Nothing is verified or charged.
  4. Press Start. The check runs inside the Actor on any Apify plan: syntax, the domain and its mail server, disposable domains, role mailboxes and typos (gmial.com becomes gmail.com and is verified once more). It does not probe the mailbox, so it cannot see a dead mailbox on a live domain; if you need that, turn "Built-in verification" off and BounceVerify's deep SMTP check runs on your account.
  5. Open the key-value store. sendable.csv holds the addresses to send to, risky.csv the ones to send with care or skip (role mailboxes, catch-alls, free mail, low fit) with the reason, and bad.csv the ones that will bounce. The dataset has the same rows ranked, with a fit score, first name, seniority and a one-line call for each.

What a run costs

You pay per qualified email and only for those: $0.002 with the rules only, $0.04 with the AI fit score and call (plus about $0.0004 in tokens), the first 25 qualified emails free. Invalid, disposable, role, duplicate and low-score addresses are never charged. For 100 addresses that keep 55: $0.11 rules only, $2.22 with AI. There is no second bill, because the check runs inside the Actor. A raw verifier is cheaper per row (from $0.0007), but it bills every row and leaves the filtering to you. Our estimate for the same 100 qualified emails, all in, is $0.20 here against $0.13–$0.16 for a raw verifier plus about three hours of hand filtering.

Automate it

Open the task the run saved and click Schedule. Point the CSV link at a Google Sheet that keeps growing, put your address in "E-mail me the new qualified emails", and every week you get a digest with only the new addresses and the trend against last week. The cross-run memory skips every address you already have, so a re-run of the same list costs nothing. In code:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("rich_minds/email-list-qualifier-ai").call(run_input={
    "sourceMode": "actor", "csvUrl": "<your Google Sheet link>", "icpDescription": "VPs and heads of growth at B2B SaaS",
    "maxQualified": 500})
print(client.key_value_store(run["defaultKeyValueStoreId"]).get_record("OUTPUT")["value"]["cleanFiles"])

Need one address at a time, for a signup form? Send emails: ["a@b.io"] and read OUTPUT.verdict — send, send-with-care, skip or reject with the reason — from an n8n, Make or Zapier step.

Try it free: the first 25 qualified emails cost nothing.

Email List Cleaner: Bulk Email Verify, Keep Qualified Emails on the Apify Store →