Migrate from Emailable

This guide shows how to replace Emailable's verification calls with Mailbeam. Most migrations take 30–60 minutes: the work is swapping one request and mapping Emailable's state string onto Mailbeam's boolean plus score.

Why developers switch

• EU data residency: Emailable processes on US infrastructure, so EU companies need Standard Contractual Clauses; Mailbeam processes in Frankfurt with a DPA on every plan
• Built for forms: Emailable's single-address latency is around 250ms, slow for validating inline while someone is still typing
• Graded catch-all: Emailable returns accept-all domains as risky or unknown with nothing to threshold on; Mailbeam adds a 0–100 score and a reason
• Pricing you can isolate: credit bundles plus separately priced deliverability add-ons make the cost of verification itself hard to read
• Sandbox mode: a deterministic test mode for CI, rather than calling production

One thing genuinely favours Emailable: it offers seed and inbox-placement testing and ongoing deliverability monitoring, which Mailbeam deliberately does not. Teams that need those often keep Emailable for deliverability and move only verification.

Endpoint mapping

Authentication

Emailable passes the API key as a URL query parameter, which means it ends up in access logs, browser history and proxy traces. Mailbeam takes a Bearer token in the header, so the credential stays out of the URL.

Emailable (old):

curl "https://api.emailable.com/v1/verify?email=user@example.com&api_key=YOUR_KEY"

Mailbeam (new):

curl -X POST https://api.mailbeam.dev/v1/verify \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MAILBEAM_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"email": "user@example.com"}'

Response mapping

Emailable reports a single state string. Mailbeam splits the same information into a boolean you can branch on and a score you can threshold.

Migrating the call

Emailable (old):

const res = await fetch(
  `https://api.emailable.com/v1/verify?email=${email}&api_key=${apiKey}`
);
const { state } = await res.json();
if (state !== "deliverable") return 422;

Mailbeam (new):

// No SDK to install — see /docs/quickstart for this 12-line wrapper.
import { verifyEmail } from "./lib/mailbeam.js";

const { valid, score, reason } = await verifyEmail(email);
if (!valid || score < 60) return 422;

Note what the old branch was doing: state !== "deliverable" rejects risky and unknown along with genuine failures. If your signup funnel was quietly dropping accept-all corporate addresses, this is where it was happening.

What to check first: risky and unknown

Emailable collapses two different situations into strings you have to interpret. An accept-all domain and a server that refused to answer both arrive as something other than deliverable, and most integrations reject both. Mailbeam separates them, so you can decide once and for each case:

const { valid, status, catchAll, score, reason } = await verifyEmail(email);

if (status === "unknown") {
  // The server would not answer — greylisting, timeout, temporary refusal.
  // This is not evidence the mailbox is bad. Accept and re-verify later.
  return acceptPendingReverification();
}

if (catchAll) {
  return score >= 70 ? accept() : challenge({ reason });
}

return valid ? accept() : reject({ reason });

Next steps

• API Reference — POST /v1/verify
• Catch-all scoring
• Mailbeam vs Emailable
• Pricing