Frequently asked questions

There are a lot of services out there providing trash-mail addresses only. One example is mailinator. They target on give away disposable email addresses even without any signup process. So it is very easy for users to get such temporary addresses – if needed with 20 different domains. This is bad and they are flagged as “BLOCK” here. But what about all the other services like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo where users can also get free emails? Are they blocked?

I see the mentioned big-3 as a special case. The short answer is: they are flagged “OK”, we do not block them. Why? Because they are the big-3 and the signup process is not so easy that people looking for a trashmail account would use them in first place. If we block it generally we are sure that you will lose a lot of legitimate customers. If you want to block them anyway please simply add them to your local blacklist.

So the short answer is: We block providers of one-time email services who are advertising with this particular disposable email feature. Including all related domains (whether public or hidden).

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Sometimes it may happen that a very new domain with DEA services will be flagged as “OK” when it appears the first time. A subsequent testing of any new domain will be done. This can cause that checking the same domain a few minutes later will lead to the right “BLOCK” response. If a domain we should block remains unblocked as our robots are not detecting any details to flag them please drop us a line.

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I really try hard to reduce those “false positives” and I believe that it is better to have a single subscriber with an one-time address than losing one with a real email. Every new BLOCK-domain in the database is beeing checked by different ways. And of course, most of them are double-checked by human. See the related topic “handpicked list“. If you detect a domain which is flagged as BLOCK mistakenly, please report so I can unblock it immediately.

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Have you tried using the handpicked attribute? If the result it is still not what you expect, I kindly ask you to report this mistake.

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I do not provide a list of trash-mail domains as it will be used mainly by people who are looking for such services as users. As my focus is on limiting fake-subscribers this will invert the benefit for the community …

If you really can not live with the everytime up-to-date online service and prefer a list I can sell a hashed (SHA1) list which is also suitable to use as a local blacklist (but you will not see the domain names in clear text) or to check your existing subscriber domain names. The availability and price depends on several parameters and on your desired use. Please contact me if you would like to use the DEA database information offline.

But please keep in mind: using the online service is the better choice in most cases.

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Captcha normally does a great job. For robots it is hard to register indeed.

What Captcha cannot block are human subscribers using one-time email-addresses. It is bad to have such addresses in your userbase for several reasons. And yes, it is easy to block *.ru addresses, known domains like trashmail.net, and some others – but they are changing continuously. This service currently detects thousands of manually selected dea domains (see statisticsfor current details).

So maybe it is a good alternative for your manually maintained blocklist.

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Oh, yes! Use them all, combine them to match your specific needs, support their operators! There are really great services out there to help prevent or stop spam. When talking about spam we have to define what kind of spam we are talking about exactly. If you want to stop automated registration and posts in your forum the service provided here will not lead to your expected result. For that case chose a captcha service, stopforumspam.com, or use one of the blacklists provided by Spamhaus.

If you are sure that your subscribers are human and not robots one problem remains anyway: there are subscribers with one-time-email addresses. Even if you use the double-opt-in method you have no possibility to filter for that kind of addresses. And that’s bad for several reasons.

This is exactly where block-disposable-email.com is the right choice: this service detects a lot of one-time email addresses, eg. all the mailinator domains, spamgourmet, and 1.000 others. With measures to reduce false positives dramatically. Try it here.

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It is not necessary to submit email addresses. The service also responds to domain names. The MOD for phpBB does it this way (split the address at the @ sign and submits the domain part only).

The JSON based interface needs a domain only input and does not check email address. You see: I do not want to collect your subscribers email addresses!

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Currenlty the service is hosted by three virtual server in order to increase the uptime.

Update April 2011: The mirror-service for load balancing started on April 26th 2011. The server is located in Chicago, USA. If you want to access the mirror server directly please contact me. If you access check.block-disposable-email.com the two existing servers will be queried alternately without the need of changing anything.

Update June 2011: An additional mirror server is online. No changes needed on the client side.

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How it will be handled does not depend on the service itself but the way you integrate it.

If you check first if the service responds no blocking should happen if it is not reachable in the second a new user subscribes. Additionally you can set the timelimit how long the script waits for a response of the service in PHP: ini_set(‘default_socket_timeout’,8).

Code example:
if ($response = @file("http://check.block-disposable-email.com/check.php?mail=".$domain))
{
if ($response[0]<>"OK") echo "Something wrong ... do not allow to subscribe";
}
else echo "OK, user is allowed to subscribe";

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A JSON api is available, see the documentation for more details. A XML interface is planned currently, but not in progress so far. If you need this feature please contact me.

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Not yet – but I am working on it. My idea is to provide something we could call “trust rating” where several factors are summed up, eg. the domain age as some of the trashmail providers register new domains very often to make the detection by blacklists more complicated.

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It is provided as a “freemium” model. This service is free for up to 200 queries a month. If you plan to need more queries please see the pricing.

For really huge site (>50.000 queries a month) please contact me to discuss an individual way.

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There is a number of easy to use plugins for popular software. See Modules for Standard-Software for a complete list.

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The service will not check your submitted domains anymore until you add credits. It will always answer with an OK message in order to avoid problems.

Additionally the service will send you several emails to inform you about the number of free credits if they are running low and (if necessary) the information that the service has been stopped.

As a developer you might find this status api helpful.

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Yes, of course. Please have look at this status api description.

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First of all: It is not necessary anymore (as of Feb 2nd, 2013), simply leave it blank. It’s an option for legacy reasons.

The user authentication is done by api keys, not by ip address of the server accessing the api. So shared hosting (several server with the same ip) is not a problem anymore – simply add different api keys if needed and use them accordingly.

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Congratulations! It’s really not easy to find alternatives in this huge jungle.

We think that nearyl every reasonable service exists more than once – and we try to feel proud of beeing the template for copies …

Frankly speaking we noticed some very similar looking services. They come and go – which is not very convenient for their users if they just finished implementing. In addition the number of domains flagged as dea domains is not that remarkable high compared to bdea.cc. And – maybe the worst case for commercial users – some of the services are full of false positives. But, this is a fact, they are free of charge.

What we provide is not free of charge – but we offer a high quality at a reasonable price. We do it that way as we want to reach our goals:

1. High reliability (in terms of api uptime as well as the number of detected dea domains)
2. Quick detection of new dea domains
3. Zero false positives
4. Provide a high quality service at a fair price (free for small sites)
5. Provide data in a format that fits to the technical and business related requirements of our customers (see eg. list of dea domains for bulk offline checking).
6. Stay online for the next decades and beeing the first choice when it is about detecting disposable email services

Would be really nice to get in touch and find out what you are looking for. Do not hesitate to contact us.

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