invalid_syntax
The input does not parse as an email address
Even after Spaw strips display names, mailto: links, quotes and invisible characters, what is left is not a syntactically valid address, so nothing else was checked.
- appears in
- reason
- verdict
- undeliverable
- credits
- Free. Invalid input never costs a credit.
What it means
Spaw first pulls the address out of whatever was pasted: a display name such as Mia K <[email protected]>, a mailto: link, spreadsheet quotes, trailing punctuation, zero-width and non-breaking characters are all removed. What remains is parsed against RFC 5322. invalid_syntax means that even after that cleanup there is no address to check: a missing @, a domain without a top-level label, spaces inside the username, or a bare word.
Because no domain could be extracted, every other field in the response is null, syntax_valid is false, and the risk score is fixed at 100.
What to do
Fix the input before retrying. When the value comes from a form, show the user the exact value that was checked (it is echoed in the email field) so a paste error is easy to spot.
Example response
{
"email": "mia@acme",
"deliverable": "undeliverable",
"reason": "invalid_syntax",
"syntax_valid": false,
"risk_score": 100
}Abbreviated: a real answer carries all 27 fields, listed in the verify-email reference.
Related
- invalid_local_part · the username breaks the rules its own provider enforces
- no_mx_records · the domain has no mail servers at all
- null_mx · the domain declares that it never accepts mail
- mx_unresolvable · the mail servers the domain points at do not exist
- mailbox_not_found · the mail server rejected the mailbox during the handshake
- mailbox_disabled · the mailbox exists but its provider has disabled it
- suppressed · the address is on your account's suppression list
- All verdict reasons
- Verdicts and the risk score
- API reference
markdown version: /docs/reasons/invalid_syntax.md