3. Prepare the Identifiers

Make sure you pre-process and hash your identifiers before calling the ATS Envelope API . The most common identifiers are emails. The ATS Envelope API also supports hashed phone numbers for users in the U.S or Asia-Pacific countries.

Pre-process the Identifiers

To improve your match rate to audience data, we recommend some basic steps for data normalization to ensure you're calling the API with valid identifiers.

For emails:

• Validate the email against a regular expression.
• Remove spaces, tabs and other empty characters from the plaintext email.
• Convert any cApiTaL letters into the lowercase equivalent. For example; ​[email protected]​​ should become​[email protected]​​.
• For ALL email addresses - remove any pluses "+" ​and what comes after it. For example; ​[email protected]​​ should become ​[email protected]​​.
• For GMAIL addresses, remove any dots "." before "@". For example; [email protected]​​ should become ​[email protected]​​.
• Drop "fake" emails. We recommend using an email validator library to filter out fake emails.

For phone numbers
Ensure you remove any country codes or formatting before SHA1 hashing, e.g.:
+1 (415) 555-6656 should become 4155556656 before hashing.

Hash Identifiers Properly

Hash identifiers and indicate the correct identifier type when you call the Envelope API.

For email identifiers
We recommend calling the API with all three email hash types to get the best match rate. Using a library like jshashes on the web or node is also recommended. See our Best Practices for technical guidance.

• SHA256 (use this if you are only able to hash one)
• SHA1
• MD5

For phone number identifiers (U.S. only)
For a user with a phone number identifier, only SHA1 hashes should be passed. Note that hashed phone numbers are currently only supported for U.S. ten-digit phone numbers.