Disposable Email Checker is a library that allows applications to check for users signup with disposable email addresses. This is very important for services that provide some trial period based on the email address. Hence, if users use disposable addresses, then they can potentially bypass the time limit. Other applications may use it to make sure that they have valid emails that they can use for future correspondence.
In addition to providing a way to detect disposable addresses, this library also provides a way to classify these in several categories. Some applications may decide to accept some of these categories but not the other. This provides a great flexibility for each application to block the cases that doesn't work for its domain.
This project started with offering a php library, but in v2, it has been refactored to separate the domain lists from the code. This enables the following scenarios:
- Providing implementations in multiple languages that consumes such data files.
- Enable apps to easily embed these data files and consume them directly.
- Simplify the process of updating the list to add more domains.
Shredder Addresses - These are not really common, some other types end up becoming a shredder emails, but these ones starts as such. Shredder email addresses delete all emails that are sent to it without storing them, forwarding them, or making them available to the user that created the address. They are typically used in scenarios where users are required to provide a valid email address but they are not expecting any valuable data or signup activation link to be sent to it.
Forwarding Addresses - These are pretty common. In this case users define a disposable email address that forwards to their real address. At any point in time they may decide to deactivate this email address. Some of these may still accept the emails as if they are valid, but it is not forwarded anymore, and hence becoming a shredder address. Some of these allow users to provision a certain duration or number of emails after which the address expires.
Time Bound Addresses - These are a special kind of forwarding addresses that expire after a time duration that is configured by the user. After such duration the address becomes a shredder address. This duration is typically enough for a user to do the transaction that they required the address for. For example, signup for a service, do a transaction with a shop, etc.
Free Email Boxes - The most common providers of these are the free web mail providers. The most commonly known are Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo. Although these are free, they are not commonly used as disposable address. Hence, although this library provides a check for them, they are not considered disposable. Blocking these is likely to block a lot of legitimate users.
This library has a list of rules that are used to determine whether an address is disposable or not. The library does not connect to the Internet to determine the kind or the validity of the address. The library may be enhanced in the future to provide applications with ways of explicitly requiring online checks.
This library is available as open source with LGPL license, so you can use it in both open source and commercial applications. The best ways to contribute back to this library are:
- Report service providers that the library should detect but it doesn't.
- Report bugs and feature request in the bug tracker.
- Provide ports for the library in languages other than PHP.
To report bugs and feature requests use the associated github bug tracker.
The versioning for this library is formatted as follows "1.2.3".
(1) This is the major version which will change when there are major changes or re-implementation.
(2) This is the minor version which will change when the APIs changes. Most of the time these won't be breaking changes, but sometimes they may be.
(3) This is the data version which is the only one changed in releases that just update the rules that are used to determine that an email address is disposable.