Ask HN: list of domains for university emails | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: list of domains for university emails

3 pointsjmtame6 comments

i'm trying to implement a way to restrict registration based on having a .edu account for specific schools, anyone know of a comprehensive list somewhere? i'm having no luck with my search

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Why don't you just check if the email ends with .edu? Edu domain names are restricted to accredited post-secondary institution, handled by educase. http://net.educause.edu/edudomain/

In my experience the .edu should all be active universities. My university recently replaced the college in its name with university. We didn't add any degree programs, we were just recognizing that the school already had university status. And the .edu domain for our old name expired after about a year, I think. Right now our old name doesn't even link to our new website anymore, and educause has the registry on the whois record for the site.

I suggest using the Department of Education college data. Most of the ~7,000 US schools listed have homepage URL listed, which you could grab the domain from with relative ease. Aside from that, you're probably looking at parsing Wikipedia pages or grabbing data from Petersons, which is not free. The DOE dataset is a good starting point, but you'll run into a fair (~300? I don't remember exactly) schools without domains listed, but they're schools like Joe's Barber School, not major universities. Any reasonably sized school has a domain in the DOE dataset. Peterson's is good, but they have restrictions on use which can be annoying to deal with if you care about legality.

Also, on the note of .edu domains being restricted to post -secondary institutions; that's not entirely true. That wasn't the original rule, so some non-university level schools are grandfathered in and own .edu domains. For instance, my high school has a .edu domain.

If you can't get a definitive list, try a whitelist approach with a moderated queue for any domains not matching the whitelist.

Once you see a domain that's an educational institute it gets whitelisted and further registrations from that domain get ok'd.

No matter what text you include there, you're gonna get the odd student registering with a hotmail/gmail/yahoo account (I've tried something similar in the past). Try and get a list of free email accounts to give feedback on those straight away.

I think any domain using the .edu TLD is safe straight-away, but I'm not from the US, so it may be worth clarifying that.

One would assume that you only want US institutions? Because nobody else really uses .edu to any great degree of consistency.

type in the specific schools in google and grab the first result?

you could automate this quite easily, too.

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