HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

alexchardin

5 karma · joined January 6, 2017

submissionscomments
alexchardin··on Ask HN: Would you see value in a “verify email” API?
Well, aside from webhooks or anything, Kickbox and its competitors seem to focus on checking if an email address exists based on DNS and SMTP pings.

This is valuable, but I want to be able to know for sure that 1. the email is "real" and 2. the person using the email address actually has access to it and can receive emails on it. Thus the process of actually sending an email to the provided address and making them click a link.

I've still not seen anything that provides this functionality.

alexchardin··on Ask HN: Would you see value in a “verify email” API?
Understood on the privacy concerns. Good point.

Agreed that the Callback URL is definitely preferable, if the consuming application has a backend (Lambda or more substantial). Thanks!

alexchardin··on Ask HN: Would you see value in a “verify email” API?
Thanks for the reply.

I was thinking either pinging or some sort of a "check" button that the user would click/tap (e.g. Cloudflare's button to check the status of NS transfers). Not the smoothest part of the idea. This decision would ultimately be left to the consumer of the API. Also, in thinking this through a little more I think it is also applicable to applications that do have their own backend, in which case they could provide a callback.

I like your idea on 3/4. That could maybe be a configurable option