When using Trestle’s APIs, you may come across several different warning types. Some of these warnings can be useful and insightful when it comes to understanding the various types of responses you can get.
What are the warnings, and when do they show up? #
Each product can produce unique types of warnings. These are tailored to the type of product and the typical use cases for which Trestle sees its clients using those APIs. They will typically indicate something incorrect about what was sent to Trestle or something outside of our coverage (for specific scenarios) or even provide a flag to identify inputs to which you may want to apply filters.
To be more specific, warnings can be triggered by scenarios like missing data, invalid inputs, inputs not covered by Trestle (e.g., international numbers), or to identify a specific type of input (e.g., a free or disposable email). All of these are good insights that can be used by the business to improve their verification/enrichment workflows.
Lastly, warnings do not mean something is wrong with the Trestle product or that it is not functioning correctly. If there are any issues, they would be a non-200 HTTP response or something provided in the error field returned with each API product response.
List of Warnings by Product #
Reverse Phone API, Caller Identification API, and Phone Validation API #
- Invalid Input: The query parameters contained an invalid input. For example, a character like “@” cannot be included in a phone number.
- International number: Please contact us for access.
- Missing Input: A required field was not submitted. For these APIs, this would mean the phone number was not provided.
Reverse Address API #
- Missing Input: A required field was not submitted. (e.g., the address was not provided.)
- Invalid Address: An invalid address was submitted in the query parameters. (e.g., partial address street lines, use of special characters, incomplete addresses (no city, state, or zip code to identify respective address))
- Invalid House/Building Number: An address was provided, but the house or building number in the “street address line 1” parameter was not an actual address. (e.g., the correct address is 123 Main Street, but the address provided was 122 Main Street. In this example, 122 does not exist.)
- Missing Unit/Apt/Suite Number: An address was provided, but the apartment, unit, or suite number was missing.
- Invalid Unit/Apt/Suite Number: An address was provided with an invalid unit, apartment, or suite number. (e.g., a character that shouldn’t be in the unit number was included.)
Real Contact API #
- Missing Input: A required field was not submitted. (e.g., a query did not include a name or a phone number.)
- Invalid Input Address: An address has been provided that is not valid. (e.g., the “street address line 1” contains a street address number that does not exist on that street.)
- Invalid House/Building Number: An address was provided, but the house or building number in the “street address line 1” parameter was not an actual address. (e.g., the correct address is 123 Main Street, but the address provided was 122 Main Street. In this example, 122 does not exist.)
- Missing Unit/Apt/Suite Number: An address was provided, but the apartment, unit, or suite number was missing.
- Invalid Unit/Apt/Suite number: An address was provided with an invalid unit, apartment, or suite number. (e.g., a character that shouldn’t be in the unit number was included.)
- Free Email Service Provider: An email address from a free email service provider, like Gmail. This might be fine for certain businesses, while others might have a different flow based on this warning.
- Domain is a catch all and does not support validation: We detected a “catch-all” email domain, which will always be sent to an email inbox but likely won’t be read or monitored.
- Tumbled Email: The local part of an email address (the part before the @) has been altered. (e.g., john.smith+234@gmail.com)
- Disposable Email: An email address for a domain that is known to provide disposable email addresses. (e.g., cloak.id will generate emails on the fly that can later be discarded.)
- Privacy Email: A privacy email is an alternate email address that hides the real one. These are frequently temporary, disposable, or auto-forwarded addresses and do not reflect a monitored inbox or a link to a real person.
- Email is a spam trap: An email address specifically set up by inbox providers or anti-spam organizations to catch spammers. Sending emails to spam traps can harm a sender’s reputation.
- Potential Junk Email: An email address that contains words or character combinations that would likely indicate it’s not a real or usable email address, such as test@noemail.com.
- International phone number: Please contact us for access.
- Invalid Phone: A phone number was provided that is not a valid phone number (e.g., a number with too many numbers.)
- Invalid Email: An email address has been provided that is not valid. (e.g., the email address does not contain the @ symbol.)
- Invalid IP Address: The IP address provided is not valid (e.g., not a IPv4 or IPv6 address.)
How to Use Warnings and Apply Business Rules #
Depending on the type of warning (context-based vs. validation-based), there are different ways to leverage these warnings. When you receive a context-based warning like “Free Email Service Provider,” the lead may still score high, but this type of email may not be the type of lead you would like to target.
Warning = “Free Email Service Provider” || “Disposable Email”
With this example, you could filter these leads out of a business-oriented campaign.
Alternatively, suppose you are submitting queries with phone numbers and want to identify fraud abuse patterns. In that case, you may identify queries with invalid inputs and look for opportunities to re-think that lead capture method.
When you think about how rules can be applied based on warnings, the most effective implementation will be when you identify patterns of activity from which you can extract insights or types of email inputs that you can filter/prioritize differently based on your use case.
If you have any questions about warnings or would like to discuss this further, please email us at support@trestleiq.com.