AWS-SDK-SES: How Can I Check the Existence of an Email Address in Rails?

Question

I currently have Rails applications that use SES to send emails. Unfortunately no matter how much code I put in my application I still get emails with invalid email addresses.

I want to use AWS to verify if I have a valid email address, meaning that the syntax is correct and does other verification like checking if the mailbox exists.

I installed the aws-sdk-rails gem in my application. I added my access_key_id and secret_access_key to config/credentials.yml.enc.

I added the following code from this awsdocs/aws-doc-sdk-examples GitHub repository to my contact form and made minor changes.

require 'aws-sdk-ses'

# Replace recipient@example.com with a "To" address.
recipient = params[:email]
error = " "

# Create a new SES resource in the us-west-2 region.
# Replace us-west-2 with the AWS Region you're using for Amazon SES.
ses = Aws::SES::Client.new(region: 'us-west-2')

# Try to verify email address.
begin
  ses.verify_email_identity({
    email_address: recipient
  })

  puts 'Email sent to ' + recipient

# If something goes wrong, display an error message.
rescue Aws::SES::Errors::ServiceError => error
  puts "Email not sent. Error message: #{error}"
end

I entered an email address that AWS SES said that the mailbox didn't exist this morning. However when I ran this code it didn't produce an error as I thought it might. When I checked the Rails debug log error was blank. The region in my code is the one that I use to successfully send transactional emails from all my websites.

I couldn't find any documentation about that code that says how much verification it does for the email address.

Can I use this gem to find if email addresses exist or have other problems like SES checks when an email has a To: email address?