In Scrub Your Bulkmail List NOW!! I made the point that allowing disposable email addresses in your bulk email list is bad. While I stand by this still, the thought occurred to me that there should be an easy way from preventing them from ever being in the list in the first place.
Right away, the obvious idea of creating a script to handle this came to mind; something that I could include in sites I write for StreetWise, similar to Bad Behavior.
Getting into the spirit of the idea I started doing some research and found out that a service already exists for this. Undisposable.net touts itself as "a collaborative protection system against disposable email addressing (DEA)".
The service only works for REST, XML-RPC protocols and PHP serialization so it's pretty easy to get going. Initially, I thought the service was cool. It pretty much did everything I was looking for, even going so far as releasing some of the worst code I've EVER seen in example code (what the hell though, it is free after all).
Then I started to dig a little deeper and I started to lose confidence Undisposable.net was worth investing my time in.
Taking a look at the site (it's amazing how much a site says about something):
- The lack of any openness about their data was disappointing.
- Their copyright hasn't been updated in 2 years.
- The API hasn't been updated in over a year.
- The service is binary (either an email is disposable or it isn't).
- As mentioned before, their sample code is pure crap.
All of the above means I'm not going to use them. Nope. Just can't invest my time in something like that especially when it's used for user participation. No ma'am.
Instead, like an idiot, I wrote my own.
INSERTNAMEHERE is essentially the same as undisposable.net except without the suck. Here's what I have in mind for this basic, BASIC, version.
- REST API
- Score based retured on ambiguous results
- 100% Open Source Codebase
- 100% Open database
- Caches sent emails for no longer than 24 hours.
http://onlinegroups.net/groups/ogn_admins/messages/post/PNbgOh5n70j1zB08XmBFE
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/E-mail/Spam/Preventing/Temporary_Addresses/