Disposable email checker
Paste an address or a domain. We’ll tell you if it’s a throwaway. No signup.
How we decide
No machine learning and no score. Lists, mail servers and a few plain rules.
We read the domain
Only the part after the @. Throwaway services are recognised by domain, so
anything@mailinator.comandx.mailinator.comget the same answer.We look it up on the lists
More than 70,000 domains from five open lists, refreshed daily. One list counts by itself. The other four are looser, so a domain from those needs two of them to agree, and popular sites are filtered out.
We set relays apart
Private forwarding services like SimpleLogin and Firefox Relay have a real person behind them. They get their own answer and never count as disposable, even if a list names them.
We look at its mail servers
A domain that isn’t listed but shares mail servers with known disposable services gets flagged as possibly disposable. That’s a signal, and coverage is partial. A domain with no mail server can’t receive anything at all.
Block or flag?
Block
Refuse the signup and ask for a permanent address.
- Free trials, credits or anything you give away per account.
- Offers limited to one per person.
- Products where mail you send has to be read, like invoices or password resets.
The cost: a real person with a throwaway address goes away. Say why in the error, and they may come back with another one.
Flag
Let them in, and mark the account.
- Newsletters, communities and free tools where a bad signup costs you little.
- Anywhere people have a fair reason for privacy.
- Possibly disposable results, which are a signal and not proof.
The cost: you get the signups, and have to do something later: ask them to confirm, hold back credits, or leave them out of your numbers.
Not sure? Flag first, then look at what you caught. The API returns disposable, suspect and relay_domain as separate fields, so the choice stays yours.
const res = await fetch("https://mailvet.dev/v1/check", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.MAILVET_KEY}`,
"content-type": "application/json",
},
body: JSON.stringify({ email }),
});
const { disposable, relay_domain } = await res.json();
if (disposable) {
// block it, or flag it for a closer look
}
// relay_domain is a real person: let it throughStraight answers
Want this at your signup form? The first 100 API checks a month are free.
Get API key- Does it catch everything?
- No. New throwaway domains appear all the time, and a domain nobody has listed yet comes back as not on the list. Some services also run on domains they share with ordinary users. Treat "not on the list" as no evidence, not as safe.
- Is Gmail disposable?
- No. Gmail is a free mailbox provider, and those addresses are normal, permanent ones. A person can still make a spare Gmail account, but no domain check can see that.
- What's a relay address?
- A private address that forwards to someone's real inbox, from a service like SimpleLogin, Apple Hide My Email or DuckDuckGo. People use them to keep their real address private. We report them separately, as relay_domain in the API, and we don't mark them risky for it. Some relays, like iCloud+ and Fastmail masked addresses, sit on normal mail domains and can't be told apart.
- Does it send email?
- No. We don't send anything to the address and we don't connect to its mail server. So we can't tell you whether a particular mailbox exists, only what its domain is.
- Is it free?
- Yes, this page is free with no signup, up to 30 checks a minute. The API has a free plan of 100 checks a month and paid plans above that.
- How does it update?
- The API downloads the open lists once a day and applies them. A domain that drops off the lists drops off ours. We also collect the domains temp-mail services publish. One that two services offer goes on by itself, and one that a single service offers waits until we've reviewed it. Those stay once listed, unless we take one off. A new service gets caught once a list or our collection has it, or sooner if its mail servers give it away.