A detect temporary email addresses (DEA) is an email that can be used for a limited time before it expires. People can use DEAs to sign up for online services, to protect their real email addresses from spammers or to avoid getting blackmailed by cybercriminals.

A DEA can easily be set up and discarded, making it an attractive tool for malicious users to bypass security measures in place to prevent data leaks. As a result, individuals can be put on mailing lists for emails they don’t want and may have their personal information exposed to cybercriminals.

Disposable email addresses also pose a significant problem for marketers and businesses that are trying to build a healthy and engaged mailing list. A person using a DEA doesn’t take your business seriously, and they are likely to unsubscribe from your mailing list once their email address self-destructs or they find another service to sign up for.

Shielding Your Platform: How to Detect and Block Temporary Email Addresses

To detect temporary email addresses, the Email Validation API provides a free and easy-to-use tool. By detecting the presence of a DEA in an email address, we can return a message to indicate that the address is not valid or that it appears to be from a temporary email domain.

The tool takes the email address and searches for it in a database of more than 50k domains associated with disposable emails. If the search results in a match, the API will return an error with the text “Disposable or blacklisted domain”. You can then filter the results to find the DEA-related emails and remove them from your mailing list.