Verify your Shopify customer emails before you send

1. 1
   In Shopify

   Export your customers from Shopify

   1. From your Shopify admin, go to Customers.
   2. To verify only the customers who agreed to receive your marketing emails, click the Email subscribers segment.
   3. Click Export.
   4. Select All customers, or # customers matching your filters to export the open segment alone.
   5. Under Fields included, check Customer tags and Customer metafields.
   6. Select CSV for Excel, Numbers, and other spreadsheet programs, then click Export customers.
   7. Up to 50 customers, your browser downloads the file. Beyond that, Shopify emails it to you, and to the store owner if that is not you.

   Warning

   Keep this export as it is: you bring the result back by re-importing some of its rows, and an import that overwrites a customer replaces its data with the file, tags included.

   Tip

   PricklyMails only needs the addresses: copy the Email column into a new file for the batch.

   SourceShopify's official help center

   • Importing and exporting customer lists (opens in a new tab)help.shopify.com
   • Email subscriber list management (opens in a new tab)help.shopify.com
2. 2
   In PricklyMails

   Verify the file in PricklyMails

   1. In the dashboard, open Batches and click New batch.
   2. Drop the file you exported from Shopify: a .csv or .txt with one address per line, no header row and no quotes. A header row would count as an address in the estimate, though it is never billed, and a quoted address would not be verified: the report lists both as malformed. You can also paste the list.
   3. The dashboard counts the addresses and shows the estimated cost in tokens before anything is sent, then you click Submit batch. A batch holds at least 20 addresses, and your plan sets the largest list it can hold.
   4. The list is verified in the background. Once the batch is done, open it and click Download report: you get a CSV with a row for each address of your file, giving its verdict, its reason, its score and its recommendation, with the dashboard's labels.

   Note

   Download the report from the browser that sent the list: that browser is what keeps the addresses, for the 16 most recent batches at most. Our servers, in Germany, only keep a one-way fingerprint of each one.

   What the report says

   Every address gets a recommendation: the action to take. The report writes it with the dashboard's label; the API returns a short form of it.

   Send

   The address is valid, or hosted by a large provider that accepts every address without confirming any. Send as usual.

   Review

   A domain that accepts any address (catch-all), a generic address such as contact@, a full mailbox, or a server that never answered, or refused to. Take a look before you send.

   Remove

   The address does not exist, its domain cannot receive mail, or it is disposable, mistyped or malformed. Take it out.

   Note

   A malformed address is never verified: the batch counts it under "Malformed addresses", and the report still lists it, with the verdict "Invalid", the reason "Malformed address" and the recommendation "Remove", so you take it out of Shopify with the others. A duplicate, counted under "Duplicates removed", appears only once.

   Behind each recommendation sit a verdict (Valid, Risky, Invalid or Not verifiable), a reason and a score from 0 to 100, each in its own column of the report. When a server never answers, the address comes back "Not verifiable" and the checks that got no answer are refunded.

3. 3
   In Shopify

   Bring the result back into Shopify

   Open the report in a spreadsheet and filter the Recommendation column.

   Remove

   They get unsubscribed from email marketing: Shopify Messaging stops emailing them, and each customer keeps its profile and orders.

   Shopify updates existing customers from a CSV file when you overwrite them: re-import their rows from your export, with marketing consent turned off.

   1. In a copy of your Shopify export, keep only the rows of the addresses to remove.
   2. In the Accepts Email Marketing column of those rows, enter no.
   3. Save the file as a CSV in UTF-8.
   4. In Shopify, go to Customers and click Import.
   5. Click Add file, then select your file.
   6. Check Overwrite existing customers that have the same email or phone number.
   7. Click Import customers.

   Review

   They deserve a look before your next campaign. To find them in Shopify, re-import their rows the same way without touching Accepts Email Marketing, and check Add tags to customers in this csv and use these tags to create a segment.

   Send

   They stay subscribed: nothing to do.

   Warning

   With the overwrite option checked, Shopify replaces each customer in the file with the data of its row. Import rows taken from your own export, never a file that holds the email column alone.

   Tip

   A handful of addresses? Unsubscribe them one by one: open the customer, click Edit marketing settings, clear Customer agreed to receive marketing emails, then click Save.

   SourceShopify's official help center

   • Importing and exporting customer lists (opens in a new tab)help.shopify.com
   • Email subscriber list management (opens in a new tab)help.shopify.com

Verify each address before it reaches Shopify

Does your app or sync script create customers through Shopify's Admin API, with the customerCreate (opens in a new tab) mutation? Ask PricklyMails first. If the recommendation is remove, don't create the customer with email marketing consent.

curl -s https://api.pricklymails.com/api/verify \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer pm_live_9f3a..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "email": "ana.silva@gmail.con" }' \
  | jq '{job_uuid, suggestion}'

{
  "job_uuid": "8f1c2a9e-4b7d-4e2a-9c61-3d5f0b7a2e18",
  "suggestion": "ana.silva@gmail.com"
}

curl -s https://api.pricklymails.com/api/verify/$JOB_UUID \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer pm_live_9f3a..." \
  | jq '.verifications[0] | {status, reason, score, recommendation}'

{
  "status": "invalid",
  "reason": "no_mx_records",
  "score": 0,
  "recommendation": "remove"
}

Frequently asked questions