Email reputation services play an important role in preventing abuse, especially when it comes to disposable email addresses like temp mails. When a user signs up for a service or free trial with a temporary email, it can often leads to fraud, spam, or account misuse. This is where email reputation comes in. It helps your business spot potentially malicious activity before it becomes a problem.
By monitoring the reputation of email domains, businesses can identify patterns and flag suspicious behaviour. A poor email reputation could indicate that the domain is linked to temp mail services, and by blocking those domains, businesses can protect themselves from unwanted abuse. It’s all about preventing the bad actors from getting through the door in the first place.
The more reputable the email service, the more trust it earns. On the flip side, if you ignore the reputation of the email domains interacting with your system, you become susceptible to fraudsters to slip through.
What is Temp Mail?
Temp mail, or temporary email, are services that let users create throwaway email address. These email addresses are often used for a short period, typically to receive a verification email or access a free trial, and then they’re discarded once they’ve served their purpose.
It’s important to state that temporary email can be beneficial to user privacy, but their ability to cause wreak havoc for services which offer free trials, such as AI startups, can’t be understated. When there’s a cost associated to offering a free trial, it’s important you prevent service abuse through the use of email reputation services.
How Email Reputation Services Identify Disposable Emails
Email reputation services identify disposable emails by analysing the domain of the email address. To do this, they maintain a regularly updated database of known disposable email domains. These services crawl and analyse the internet, looking for new domains being used by temp mail services and add them to their blocklist.
This is a continuous and never ending process, as these services are constantly evolving and add new domains to their lists. That’s precisely why community block lists are no longer enough. By the time you update your list, they’re already out of date. That’s why email reputation services use heuristics and analysis to evaluate if a domain is a potential high risk to your business or not, rather than simply checking if an email is blacklisted.
The Role of Real-Time Domain Detection in Preventing Abuse
Real time domain detection plays an important role in stopping temp mail abuse before it can even start. With new domains being generated every day, it’s not enough to just rely on static lists of known temp mail domains. Things change quickly, and new disposable email providers pop up every day. This is where real-time detection comes in.
Real time detection is fast and accurate. It gives your business the ability to block temporary emails addresses instantly without any delays or manual checks. If a user tries to register with a disposable email, the system immediately flags the domain, preventing the user from continuing with their actions. By using a service like Temp Mail Detector you can also tap in to its vast network, offering you a larger database of banned domains than if you maintained a block list yourself.
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Privacy and Why Only Domains are Tested
When it comes to detecting disposable emails, privacy is important. That’s why only the domain is tested and not the full email address. By focusing on the domain (the part after the @ symbol) email reputation services can still identify whether the email is from a temp mail provider, while keeping your users personal information private.
GDPR is a valid concern, and you shouldn’t be sharing private information such as your users email with 3rd party email reputation services. That’s why we only validate the domain. It’s a simple yet effective way to prevent fraud without compromising on the trust of your users.
There are drawbacks, however. By using “Plus Emails” such as [email protected] you can easily generate many seemingly new email addresses that all land in the same inbox. That’s why it’s up to your business to decide whether you allow generic email providers, plus emails, dots in emails and so on. If you’re interested in knowing how to prevent them, we wrote a handy blog post on how to block these here.
Take action
Now it’s for you to take action. We would obviously love for you to try out Temp Mail Detector, we think it’s a great solution with an incredibly effective API. That’s why we offer 200 lookups each month for free, and why we’re always one email away if you need integration support.
Don’t need to stay up to date? Then we also provide a two month delayed email list which you can access via out Github.