Mailgun is a great email address validation API that we once recommended and used. However, the recent decision by Mailgun to turn on the pricing switch has eroded a lot of its loyal users’ trust and confidence. Existing users are searching for alternatives to Mailgun for a cheaper and better solution. We were in a similar boat and hopped on to another email address validation service called Mailboxlayer which turned out to be very unreliable. This prompted us to create a new product in-house that will be far more superior than any email validation API in the market with fair pricing. Thus, Dilli Email Validation API (DEVA) was born.

DEVA is a simple API to check if a given email address is real without sending a verification email. Some of the factors used to determines validity of an email address are as follows :

• Format Validation : DEVA ensures that email address is valid. Ex : email addresses with missing @ are not valid.
• MX Records’ Existence : DEVA validates that MX records exist for the domain tied to the email address.
• ESP (Email Service Provider) Grammar Rules: Ex : @yahoo.com emails cannot have user part less than 4 characters. We learn new ESP grammar rules every now and then and incorporate into our validation algorithm.
• Profanity Check : This is a distinguishing feature of DEVA. It checks email addresses for profanities and marks them invalid if found. Ex : f***you@gmail.com may be a valid email address but is marked invalid by DEVA because no sane person would use that.
• Patterns : There are countless patterns we discovered while validating over 50,000 emails every month for our clients that are obviously invalid emails. Ex : jondoe@gmail.com, foobar@gmail.com, noemail@gmail.com, etc.  DEVA is constantly learning and building up the black listed patterns as our user base grows.
• Disposable/Temporary address: Whether or not an email address is a disposable/temporary address such as @mailinator in which case its treated as invalid.
• Role-based address: Whether or not an email address is role-based, like info@, help@, support@ in which case its treated as invalid.
• Blacklisted Domains : Ex: example.com is reserved and can’t be used in practice. Therefore, all emails having this domain are marked invalid by DEVA.

1000 email address validations will cost $8 with Mailgun but only $5 with DEVA.