Disposable email checker
Check whether an email address is disposable, temporary, role-based or from a free provider — and whether the domain can receive mail at all. No signup.
One at a time is the demo. A list is the job.
Checking one value tells you about that value. The reason anyone does this at all is the other few thousand — last week’s signup export, the list you inherited, the file nobody has opened since. Paste or upload it and every row is scored: emails, phone numbers, IPs and domains mixed together, duplicates removed and counted first.
Check a whole list — free, no signup →Same check from your code
The API returns everything above plus domain age, machine-generated handle detection, and whether the address has been reported for abuse across the LayerCall network.
curl "https://www.layercall.com/v1/verify/email?email=test@mailinator.com" \ -H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"
1,000 lookups a month free, no card. Get a key or read the docs.
What each signal means
Disposable
The domain belongs to a throwaway or temporary mail service — Mailinator, 10-minute-mail and thousands of others.
The single strongest predictor of free-trial abuse and fake signups. Someone using a mailbox that self-destructs in ten minutes is not planning to be a long-term customer.
Role account
The local part is a function rather than a person: info@, admin@, support@, sales@, billing@.
Usually a shared mailbox. Fine for B2B contact forms, poor for individual accounts, and a common source of bounces and spam complaints because nobody feels personally responsible for it.
Free provider
Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and similar consumer mail hosts.
Not a fraud signal on its own — most real people use one. It matters only in context: a free-provider address on a B2B enterprise signup is worth a second look, on a consumer product it is the norm.
MX found
The domain publishes mail-exchange records, so it can actually receive mail.
No MX means nothing you send will ever arrive. Catching this at signup prevents a dead account and a bounce that damages your sending reputation.
Questions
What is a disposable email address?
A temporary mailbox from a service that lets anyone create an address instantly, read one message and abandon it. They exist to get past email verification without giving out a real address, which makes them the most common tool for free-trial abuse and fake account creation.
How do you detect disposable domains?
A continuously updated list of known throwaway providers, combined with structural signals — domain age, MX configuration, and whether the domain behaves like a mail host or a disposable front end. New providers appear constantly, so the list is refreshed rather than static.
Should I block all disposable emails?
Usually yes on signup for anything with a free tier or trial, since that is precisely what they are used to abuse. Be more careful on checkout or support forms, where the cost of a false positive is a lost paying customer rather than a lost freeloader.
Does this verify the mailbox actually exists?
It checks that the domain can receive mail at all — syntax, MX records and classification. It does not open an SMTP session to confirm the individual mailbox: the large providers deliberately accept mail for addresses that do not exist, so a per-mailbox answer from them would be guesswork dressed as a fact.
Is checking an email address here private?
Lookups are counted for rate limiting and cached briefly for speed. We do not build marketing profiles from them — see our Privacy Policy.