The Scenario
You've got a Google Sheet with 1,200 email addresses collected through a lead form over the last six weeks — a mix of personal accounts, work addresses, and whatever people typed when they weren't paying attention. The campaign goes out Monday. You need to know, before then, which addresses are disposable, which are undeliverable, and which will bounce on send.
The bad version:
- You open Abstract's email validation docs, find the endpoint, and realize you need an API key you don't have set up
- You write a script to loop through column B, hit the endpoint for each row, and paste the results back — except row 847 returns a 429 and the whole thing stops mid-run
- You fix the rate limit, re-run from row 847, and then spend 20 minutes figuring out which rows already have results so you don't overwrite them
You're the one who collects these leads. You're not the one who should be writing API loops at 11pm the night before a send.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the data, connects to Abstract API on your behalf, and writes the validation results back into your sheet without you touching a script or a settings file.
Here's the prompt:
Validate all email addresses in column B using Abstract API and add columns for format_valid, is_disposable, is_smtp_valid, and quality_score
What You Get
- Column C:
format_valid— TRUE or FALSE for basic address formatting - Column D:
is_disposable— TRUE if the address is from a known throwaway domain - Column E:
is_smtp_valid— TRUE if Abstract's SMTP check confirms the mailbox exists - Column F:
quality_score— a numeric score you can filter on to set your own deliverability threshold - Any rows where Abstract returns an error are marked with the error code so you can handle them separately
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The addresses have extra whitespace or capitalization issues
Trim and lowercase every address in column B first, then validate each one with Abstract API and write format_valid, is_disposable, is_smtp_valid, and quality_score into columns C through F
Some rows are missing an email address entirely
Validate all non-empty cells in column B using Abstract API and write the results into columns C through F — skip blank rows and leave those result cells empty
The leads are split across two tabs — one from the web form, one from the trade show scanner
Combine the email addresses from column B of the Web Form tab and column A of the Trade Show tab into a single validated list, using Abstract API to check each one, and write the results to a new sheet called Validated Leads
The whole cleanup in one shot — dedup, validate, flag, sort
Deduplicate column B by email address, validate every unique address with Abstract API for format_valid, is_disposable, is_smtp_valid, and quality_score, then sort the results so all invalid or disposable addresses are grouped at the bottom with a 'Remove' label in column G
The pattern: cleanup and validation in a single instruction, not two separate operations you run back to back.
Try It
Open a Google Sheet with your lead list and Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI — ask it to validate column B with Abstract API before your next send. Also worth reading: how to validate IBANs before a payment run and the Abstract API hub overview.