LeadOcean + Claude: recover bounced emails and find where people went

You get a Claude chat that takes a bounced work email, asks LeadOcean who the person is, and returns their current employer, title and a fresh work email. A hard bounce usually means the person left. LeadOcean needs a free key or an OAuth sign-in, and no skill zip.

FullEnrich ships a similar Claude skill that parses the old address into a name and searches career history (FullEnrich template, September 2026). This recipe skips the name guess. LeadOcean enriches straight from the address. For a spreadsheet version, see the Clay recipe.

How it works

1. Connect LeadOcean to Claude. Add https://api.leadocean.io/mcp as a custom connector and sign in with OAuth. No key is pasted (LeadOcean docs, October 2026).
2. Paste the bounces. Give Claude one address or a short list. Ask it to skip role mailboxes such as info@ or sales@, which have no single person to find.
3. Enrich the old address. Claude calls leadocean_get_lead with the email input and reveal_email on. The tool takes a LinkedIn URL, an email, a phone or a person_id. The REST call below does the same job.
4. Compare the domains. If the new employer's domain matches the bounced one, the person never left. Flag the row and do not count it as a recovery.
5. Pick the new address. Keep an address with status verified or catch_all_valid. Skip anything else.
6. Report. Ask for a table: bounced address, new company, new title, new email, status. Re-send only from that table.

Claude should show the table and wait for you. Nothing is sent from the chat.

Configuration

The MCP route needs no code. This is the same enrichment from a terminal, with a placeholder address.

curl -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/enrich" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"email":"jane.doe@acme.com","reveal_email":true}'

Send exactly one identifier per call. A bounced address is the email field (LeadOcean docs, September 2026). If it returns no current work address, look the person up by profile URL.

curl -s "https://api.leadocean.io/v2/people/email/work?linkedin_url=https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY"

Field mapping

Cost at 10,000 rows

10,000 bounced addresses cost LeadOcean at most 10,000 records. Free covers the first 1,000. Solo at $97 a month fits the rest, because it allows 10k enrichments every 5 hours (LeadOcean pricing).

LeadOcean. A hit is one record. A person LeadOcean holds nothing for is a 404 and costs nothing. A second lookup by profile URL costs one record per call, even on a miss. LeadOcean does not refund bounces, so read email_status first.

FullEnrich skill. A work email costs 1 credit, and a miss costs 0 (FullEnrich docs, September 2026). The template calls the locate step free, but the docs list search at 0.25 credits per person returned. Ten thousand recoveries need at least 10,000 credits. That is the $499 a month tier, or $454 a month billed yearly for 120,000 credits a year (FullEnrich pricing, September 2026).

Troubleshooting

FAQ