Disposable email checker & detection API

What is a disposable email address?

A disposable email address (also called a temporary, throwaway or burner email) is an inbox that's created instantly, with no registration, and that usually expires after minutes or hours. Services like Mailinator, Guerrilla Mail, YOPmail and 10 Minute Mail let anyone receive mail at an address they never have to come back to.

People use them for understandable reasons, such as avoiding spam from a one-off download. But for a business they mean an address that will soon stop working, and often a user who never intended to stay.

Why detect disposable emails?

• Free-trial and promo abuse. A new burner inbox for every trial makes per-user limits meaningless.
• Fake accounts and spam. Bots and bad actors use throwaway addresses to create accounts at scale.
• Bounces and sender reputation. Expired inboxes bounce, and repeated bounces hurt your deliverability for everyone else on your list.
• Unreliable metrics. Sign-ups that can never be contacted inflate growth numbers and waste sales and onboarding effort.

How disposable email detection works

Disposable addresses are syntactically valid, and their domains have working mail servers, so basic validation doesn't catch them. Detection relies on knowing which domains belong to temporary inbox services:

• A large, maintained domain list. We track thousands of known disposable domains, based on the community-maintained disposable-email-domains project, and refresh the list every day.
• Subdomain matching. anything.mailinator.com is caught just like mailinator.com.
• Full validation alongside. Every check also covers syntax, domain existence, MX records, role accounts and typos, so you get one decision per address.

Should you block or flag disposable emails?

It depends on what the address is for:

When you block, say why ("Please use a permanent email address") rather than showing a generic error. Most real users will happily switch.

Disposable email detection API

Every validateemail.io response includes checks.disposable. When it's true, the overall status is risky with reason disposable:

curl "https://validateemail.io/v1/validate?email=test@mailinator.com" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VALIDATEEMAIL_KEY"

{
  "email": "test@mailinator.com",
  "status": "risky",
  "reason": "disposable",
  "checks": { "disposable": true, "mx_found": true, … }
}

Check up to 100 addresses at once with the batch endpoint. Full details are in the API reference, and the email validation guide explains every check.

Frequently asked questions