mailgun Error":"exposed account credentials

I am attempting to validate an email but when I follow the mailgun docs and have code such as follows

https://documentation.mailgun.com/en/latest/user_manual.html#email-validation

EMAILPUBLICVALIDATIONKEY = 'my sexy key'

def validateemail(emailaddress):
    return requests.get(
        "https://api.mailgun.net/v3/address/validate",
        auth=("api", EMAILPUBLICVALIDATIONKEY ),
        params={'address': emailaddress}
    )

I get the response

["{"Error":"exposed account credentials"}"]0: "{"Error":"exposed account credentials"}"length: 1__proto__: Array(0)

Solution

I haven't actually gotten this error in MailGun before. But I'm assuming exposed account credentials means that your API key got exposed and they deactivated it in order to try to protect you.

Kinda unrelated, but GitHub recently released a feature where they will scan commits for API keys and tokens and notify the company that it was exposed. Doesn't look like as of posting this MailGun is on that list, but there is also a slim chance since it's in beta that list hasn't been updated. https://help.github.com/articles/about-token-scanning/