node-email-verifier

The best possible way to verify and validate an email address in Node.

Meta

• Author: Randall Degges
• Email: r@rdegges.com
• Twitter: @rdegges
• Site: https://www.rdegges.com
• Status: production ready

If you'd like to read an article about how this library works, please check out this blog post: https://emailverification.whoisxmlapi.com/blog/how-to-verify-an-email-address-using-nodejs

Prerequisites

To use this library, you'll need to create a free WhoisAPI account: https://emailverification.whoisxmlapi.com/

If you haven't done this yet, please do so now.

Installation

To install email-verifier using npm, simply run:

$ npm install email-verifier

In the root of your project directory.

Verification Methods

Email verification is a tricky thing to do properly. There are a number of different ways to "verify" an email address, and not all of them may be appropriate for your use case.

This library is really flexible, and allows you to pick and choose what types of verification are done in a granular way. Here is a list of all the different types of email verification this library handles. This list includes all of the latest and greatest checks, which are fully supported.

All checking mechanisms conform to best practices, and provide confident verification.

Syntax Checking: This checks the email addresses and ensures that it conforms to IETF standards using a complete syntactical email validation engine.

Fake Email Pattern Detection: This checks the email address against a powerful built-in fake email pattern detector algorithm. The fake email pattern detector is capable of detecting thousands of fake emails automatically with very high accuracy.

Typo/Curse Words Check: This checks the email address against all known common typos for most email domains. This will also detect certain curse words present in the email address. This is useful if you're building an application where profanity is something you want to filter.

Mail Server Existence Check: This checks the availability of the email address domain using DNS MX records.

Mail Existence Check: This checks if the email address really exists and can receive email via SMTP connections and email-sending emulation techniques.

Catch-all Domain Email Check: This checks to see if the email domain will receive all of the email messages addressed to that domain, even if their addresses do not exist in the mail server. This tells you whether or not you've been given a wildcard/catch-all address, or an individual mailbox.

Disposable Email Address Check: This checks if the email is provided by a known Disposable Email Address (DEA) provider such as Mailinator, 10MinuteMail, GuerrillaMail and about 2000 more.

Usage

Once you have email-verifier installed, you can use it to easily verify an email address. Email verification performs a number of checks to ensure a given email address is actually valid.

This library gives you access to all sorts of email verification data that you can use in your application in any number of ways.

const Verifier = require("email-verifier");

let verifier = new Verifier("your_email_verification_api_key");
verifier.verify("r@rdegges.com", (err, data) => {
  if (err) throw err;
  console.log(data);
});

Here's the sort of data you might get back when running all checks at once:

{
  "catchAll": "false",
  "disposable": "false",
  "dns": "OK",
  "emailAddress": "r@rdegges.com",
  "free": "false",
  "mxs": [ "mail.protonmail.ch" ],
  "smtp": "OK",
  "validFormat": "OK"
}

By default, when verifying an email address all types of verification checks will be performed. This can take a while (up to two seconds), and may not be ideal for your use case.

If you prefer to only check certain types of email verification information, you can pass in your preferred checks when creating the Verifier object:

const Verifier = require("email-verifier");

let verifier = new Verifier("your_email_verification_api_key", {
  checkCatchAll: false,
  checkDisposable: false,
  checkFree: false,
  validateDNS: false,
  validateSMTP: false
});

If, for some reason, you notice that a particular email's validateSMTP status is incorrect, this usually means that the person's email provider has recently changed. The email verification API services caches SMTP checks for speed purposes, but you can force a cache refresh by specifying the optional hardRefresh option when making a query.

For instance:

const Verifier = require("email-verifier");

let verifier = new Verifier("your_email_verification_api_key");
verifier.verify("r@rdegges.com", { hardRefresh: true }, (err, data) => {
  if (err) throw err;
  console.log(data);
});

By default, this library also handles retrying failed HTTP requests for you. For instance: if the verification API service is currently down or having issues, your request will be retried up to five consecutive times before failing.

Again: this can add more request time, and may not be what you want in all cases.

If you'd prefer to lower the amount of retries that this library will perform on your behalf, you can pass in a retries option like so:

const Verifier = require("email-verifier");

let verifier = new Verifier("your_email_verification_api_key", {
  retries: 2
});

Changelog

0.4.0: 05-06-2018

• Adding support for the hardRefresh API option.

0.3.0: 4-15-2018

• Updated API endpoint.
• Switched from using username/password auth to API key auth.

0.2.1: 10-18-2017

• Updating library to work with recent API changes.

0.2.0: 10-18-2017

• Updating docs and repo path.

0.1.0: 10-1-2017

• First release!