At Gozunga, leading the way in Simple Cloud Infrastructure, we’re committed to delivering a seamless and secure experience for our customers right from the moment they sign up. Our customer signup process leverages a powerful tech stack, including n8n, Supabase, Captain Verify, and Discord, to ensure efficiency, reliability, and a internal communications. Today, we’re excited to share a specific piece of this puzzle: how we verify email addresses as part of our signup workflow. Let’s dive in!
The Big Picture
Our signup process is designed to onboard customers quickly while maintaining security and trust. We use n8n, an open-source workflow automation tool, to orchestrate the steps involved. Supabase, our scalable backend-as-a-service platform, handles data storage and management. Captain Verify steps in to validate email addresses, ensuring we only onboard legitimate users. And finally, Discord keeps our staff connected, providing updates to stay on top of the status.
While there are many moving parts, we’re zooming in on one critical element today: email verification. This step ensures that every signup is tied to a valid email address, protecting our platform from spam and abuse while keeping the process smooth for genuine users.
The Email Verification Workflow
We’ve built a standalone n8n workflow dedicated to email verification. This modular approach allows us to reuse it across different parts of our system while keeping it efficient and maintainable. Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Input and Initial Validation
The workflow starts when it receives an email address from the main signup process. Before doing anything else, we perform a quick sanity check to ensure the email isn’t blatantly invalid (e.g., missing an “@” symbol or domain). If it fails this basic test, the workflow errors out immediately. This precaution ensures we don’t waste effort on obviously incorrect information.
Step 2: Check Cached Results in Supabase
Next, we query Supabase, where we store all our email verification results. Why? Because sometimes customers try to sign up multiple times, or we may have banned an email address due to abusive behavior. By checking our database first, we avoid redundant API calls and enforce our policies consistently. If we find a stored result..say, a previously verified email or a banned one, we return that result right away and skip the external check.
Step 3: Captain Verify API Call
If there’s no cached result, we move to the heart of the process: verifying the email with Captain Verify. This simple but powerful service analyzes the email address and provides detailed insights, such as whether it’s valid, deliverable, or potentially a disposable address. We make an API call to Captain Verify, passing the email as input, and wait for their response. This step ensures we’re working with real, usable email addresses, which is crucial for both security and communication with our customers.
Step 4: Store and Return the Result
Once Captain Verify responds, we store the result in Supabase for future reference. This caching strategy speeds up subsequent checks and helps us maintain a history of verifications. Finally, we return the result – valid or invalid – back to the calling workflow in n8n, which then decides the next step in the signup process (e.g., proceeding with account creation or prompting the user to try a different email).
Why This Matters
This email verification workflow is just one piece of our broader signup process, but it plays a vital role. By integrating n8n for automation, Supabase for data management, and Captain Verify for validation, we’ve created a system that’s fast, scalable, and reliable. It protects our platform from spam accounts, reduces unnecessary API costs with caching, and ensures our customers can trust the signup experience.
Plus, it’s modular! While we’re focusing on email verification here, the same principles apply across our stack. For example, we use the similar verification methodology for SMS / phone number verification.
Try It Yourself!
Curious to see how it all comes together? The best way to experience Gozunga’s seamless signup process is to try it out for yourself. Create a FREE account today and test it out with $100 of credit. Your email address will go through this very workflow! We’d love to hear your feedback and welcome you to our growing community.
Sign up now and discover why Gozunga is the cloud service provider of choice for businesses and individuals alike.
