API - Personal Email Enrichment

Surfe now supports personal email enrichment through the API. When a work email is outdated or unreachable, personal email enrichment gives you a validated alternative. Helping you reach contacts on a personal channel when a corporate inbox isn't working.

Who Is This For?

Personal email enrichment is most useful for:

• Recruiters — reaching candidates who may not check a work inbox or have recently changed jobs
• Multi-channel outreach teams — adding a personal contact point when a work email bounces or goes cold
• Anyone whose prospects are hard to reach through a work address.

How It Works

Surfe runs personal email enrichment through multiple validation layers in sequence, moving to the next source only when the previous one returns nothing. This means you get a verified, deliverable personal email address more often — with less manual fallback.

Getting Started

Step 1: Start the Enrichment

Call POST /v2/people/enrich with acceptedEmailType set to "personal" in the enrichmentOptions object:

{
   "enrichmentOptions": {
      "acceptedEmailType": "personal",
      "skipMobileEnrichmentIfNoEmailFound": false
    },
    "include": {
      "email": true,
      "jobHistory": false,
      "linkedInUrl": false,
      "mobile": false
    },
    "notificationOptions": {
      "webhookUrl": ""
    },
    "people": [
      {
        "companyDomain": "surfe.com",
        "companyName": "Surfe",
        "externalID": "external-id",
        "firstName": "David",
        "lastName": "Chevalier",
        "linkedinUrl": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-maurice-chevalier"
      }
    ]
  }'

You'll receive an enrichmentID in the response. Use this to retrieve your results.

→ See: API - Enrich People - Understanding Surfe's Asynchronous Split Request

Step 2: Retrieve Your Results

Poll GET /v2/people/enrich/:id with your enrichmentID, or set up a webhook to be notified automatically when the enrichment completes.

Each result includes:

• emailType — will be "personal" when a personal email is found
• validationStatus — confirms whether the email address is VALID

Example result:

{
  "emails": [
    {
      "email": "david.chevalier@gmail.com",
      "emailType": "personal",
      "validationStatus": "VALID"
    }
  ],
  "status": "COMPLETED"
}

→ See: API - Webhooks

Step 3: Understand the Cost

• 2 email credits are charged per contact when a personal email is successfully found.
• No credits are charged when no personal email is found.

→ See: API - Credits & Quotas

Things to Keep in Mind

• Personal email enrichment uses the same two-step async flow as standard enrichment. Start with a POST request and retrieve results with a GET request or webhook.
• Always check emailType in the response to confirm whether the result is a personal or professional email
• Credits are only charged on a successful hit — you pay nothing on a miss.

Need Help?

If you have any questions or need further assistance, feel free to reach out to our support team or email api.support@surfe.com.