The check is a commodity. The judgement is the product.
Sortance is an email verification router. It does not run SMTP probes, does not claim a private signal, and does not sell you a dashboard. It buys checks from providers you already know and sells you the thing none of them can give you on their own.
What the name means
Sortance is a real, obsolete English word meaning conformity, agreement, correspondence. That is the product: agreement between what was predicted and what actually happened. Calibration is the brand, which is why the word is on the door.
Why it exists
Per-check verification pricing collapsed — from roughly $25 per 10,000 in 2019 to $0.00045–$0.01 per check today. The SMTP handshake became a commodity.
Accuracy did not follow it down. Microsoft-hosted mailboxes stopped answering probes truthfully, and catch-all domains never did. So teams started hand-rolling multi-provider waterfalls to compensate, and discovered that the fan-out is the easy half — the hard half is turning disagreeing labels into a number that means what it says.
Sortance is that waterfall, calibrated and cached, as one API call. If you want the long version, there is an explainer.
Three things it will not do
- No SMTP of its own. No probe infrastructure, no private signal. Every provider call is HTTPS, and every response reports which providers answered and what each one said.
- No hygiene score. No green checkmarks to screenshot. It is an API you call from your own system; the one screen that takes a list (bulk verification) hands back a probability per row and deletes the file after 7 days.
- No 99.9% accuracy claim. Catch-all domains cannot be resolved by any verifier and Microsoft-hosted mail confirms valid about half the time. Sortance reports the uncertainty instead of hiding it behind a number. The argument is on limitations.
How it is built
The whole system runs on Cloudflare Workers at the edge — the router, the cache, the calibration job and the dashboard. No raw email address is ever persisted: everything written to storage, logs or metrics is a peppered hash. Details on trust and data handling.
Getting in touch
Sign-in is by email link, so the fastest route to a human today is through your account. If your question is about a specific decision, have its trace_id ready — it is on every response, including errors.