Introduction
MailboxValidator provides 3 different API services to validate an email address, namely Single, Disposable and Free Email Validation API. Each API service is capable of validating email address based on a different criterion. In this article, we are going to explain the differences between the APIs and which one should you use to validate the email.
Single Email Validation API
The Single Email Validation API will perform a full validation on an email address. Combining various factors such as email syntax, MX record, and MX server connection, the Single Email Validation API is able to determine whether an email address is valid or not. After the validation is done, this API will return a comprehensive list of validation results for the email address.
Disposable Email API
The Disposable Email API will identify whether an email address belongs to a disposable email provider or not. For example, an email address coming from a domain called mailinator will be classified as a disposable email by this API. This is because mailinator is a disposable email provider. People tend to use disposable email address because they do not want their personal email address to be inundated with advertisements and newsletters.
Free Email API
The Free Email API will determine if an email address is coming from a free email provider or not. For example, an email address from Google, Yahoo or Hotmail is definitely a free email. Some websites such as email marketing websites required their users to use corporate email address to register for an account before purchasing their services. In such cases, they would need to able to detect whether the email address being used is a corporate or a free email address.
Which Email Validation API Should I Use?
In general, you should use the Single Email Validation API if you wish to check the validity of an email address, whether it exists and if it is safe to email them marketing materials. It’s not advisable to use the Single Email Validation API if you only want to find out if an email address is a free or disposable type, even though you could get the result eventually. The Single Email Validation API is only meant for a full and thorough validation, whereby our server will go through a series of checks, like verify the email address existence with the mail server, and check the MX record to verify the existence of the email address domain. The entire process is time consuming and for some cases it may take seconds for the result to be returned to you. Therefore, if you just want to know whether the email address is a free email or not, you should use the Free Email API instead of the Single Email Validation API. This is a fast and lightweight validation and you can usually obtain the result in milliseconds, by factoring out the network latency since no connection to the mail server is required. Similarly, for the the disposable validation, we highly recommend that you use the Disposable Email API. A faster response to your query means you can serve data to your clients quicker.
In addition, by using the 2 smaller APIs, you limit the amount of data to only what you require. If you use the Single Email Validation API, you will receive all validation parameters of the result at once. But if you are using the Free or Disposable Email API, you will only receive the result which indicate whether the email belongs to a free or a disposable provider. Short, sweet and to the point.
Conclusion
In summary, the Single Email Validation API returns more details compared to the Free and the Disposable Email APIs. However, there are some circumstances when we only need the status, whether yes or no. So choosing the right API to use is critical.
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