What should I use to detect disposable and temporary emails?

To detect disposable or temporary email addresses, you generally want to use one of these approaches:

1. Disposable email domain blocklist

Maintain a list of known disposable email domains and check the email’s domain against it.

• Example domains: mailinator.com, 10minutemail.com, guerrillamail.com
• Good for fast, simple validation
• Downside: list needs constant updating because providers change domains often

2. Email verification / reputation services

Use a third-party API that flags disposable, risky, or invalid emails. Popular options include:

• Kickbox
• ZeroBounce
• NeverBounce
• Hunter Email Verifier
• Abstract Email Validation
• MailboxLayer (or similar validation APIs)

These services often return:

• disposable/temporary email indicator
• deliverability status
• role-based email detection
• catch-all detection

3. MX and domain checks

Check whether the domain:

• exists
• has valid MX records
• is a known free mailbox provider or suspicious domain

This won’t reliably detect disposable emails by itself, but it helps as part of a layered check.

4. Self-hosted open-source detection

If you want to avoid third-party APIs, you can use:

• a maintained disposable domain blacklist
• community-maintained lists on GitHub
• your own logs + heuristics

Best practice

A common setup is:

1. validate email format
2. check MX/domain existence
3. compare against disposable domain list
4. optionally call a verification API for higher confidence

If you want, I can also recommend:

• a Python library
• a JavaScript solution
• or a free disposable email domain list/source