Several years back I created API.Toys, a small hobbyist website where I’m slowly publishing random JSON-based data endpoints for various different things.

I’ve recently updated the website to include ISO-3166-1 data as an available endpoint to query. More ISO standard data will follow in the coming months.

One of the other major features to come to the website is a basic email address validator service and API. I’m still working on fine-tuning this, but the ultimate goal is to provide a working email address validation endpoint where you can ask a host mail server if it will accept an email to a recipient address. This goes beyond syntax validation by actually telling you if the recipient mail server will attempt to deliver email on your behalf.

This validation will work reliably for big email hosts like GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo and most end-user ISP’s who will always refuse to accept a message if the email recipient doesn’t exist, but smaller email hosting providers may have blanket-accepts enabled, where email will be accepted for delivery regardless of if the target mailbox exists (ultimately still resulting in bounces).

Watch this space for updates! 🙂