Verdict: Email that never bounces.

Verdict is an open-source email verification engine that probes every mailbox over SMTP before you hit send.

## The story

I run cold outreach to crypto hedge funds, one of the hardest audiences to reach. Last cycle, 9% of my emails bounced. Not because my copy was bad. Because the addresses were dead: people had left, companies pivoted, domains expired.

Every bounce chipped away at my sender reputation. Inbox providers don't care why you emailed a dead address, they just learn to distrust your domain.

So I built a gate. Ran 72 fund managers through it. 24 turned out to be dead mailboxes caught before a single email shipped. Bounce rate dropped from 9% to under 2%.

How it works

Most tools verify after you send. Verdict flips the order:

1. Probe first: every candidate address gets a live SMTP check against the recipient's mail server

2. Catch-all detection: we probe a random mailbox at the domain first; if that also returns 250 OK, we flag the entire domain instead of lying to you

3. Gateway classification: Mimecast, Proofpoint, Barracuda and friends get tagged as RISKY, not SEND

4. Honest verdicts” LIVE / DEAD / CATCHALL / RISKY / UNKNOWN. We tell you what we can't verify instead of pretending

5. Permanent suppression: dead mailboxes never resurface on a future send

Why existing verifiers fail

- Catch-all servers return "OK" for any address, including ones that don't exist

- Enterprise gateways reject probes with errors identical to user-unknown rejections

- Some servers silently drop connections instead of responding

Verdict handles all three explicitly.

What's inside

- Free web checker: paste an email, get a verdict instantly, no signup

- Batch verification: upload a list, get stamped results

- Discovery engine: harvests public emails from domain pages, infers `{first}@` / `{first.last}@` patterns (~90% match rate vs Apollo on verifiable domains)

- Send-gate API: `can_send()` checks dedupe, cooldowns, and DNC lists before anything ships

- Self-hostable: FastAPI + Next.js, MIT licensed, your data never touches anyone else's servers

Stack

- Frontend: Next.js, deployed on Vercel

- Engine: Python FastAPI on Render

- Waitlist: Supabase

- Everything open source: github.com/omm9846/verdict

## Pricing

Freemium: 50 free checks/month. Paid tiers scale by verification volume, starting at $59/mo for 5,000 checks.

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Built in public by [Om Soni](https://peerlist.io/omsoni9846) the same stack that emailed 72 fund managers with a <2% bounce rate.

Try the free checker: https://verdict-xi-olive.vercel.app

Repo: https://github.com/omm9846/verdict