Email Veracity

A straight-forward Ruby library for checking the real-world validity of email addresses that you should probably not use.

It Can

• Validate email addresses for proper form against a pattern.
• Accept and reject addresses based whitelists and blacklists of domains.
• Check an address' domain for MX and/or A records.
• Be configured for a variety of use-cases, to be as discerning or as indiscriminate as you would like.

A Note About This Gem

I don't condone it for email validation. If you must be sure an address is real then you should send a verification message. Otherwise, relax :-)

Using The Gem

Consider the following examples:

require 'email_veracity'

address = EmailVeracity::Address.new('[email protected]')

address.valid?
# => true

address.domain.to_s
# => 'gmail.com'

address.domain.address_servers.map { |s| s.to_s }
# => ["64.233.171.83", "64.233.161.83", "209.85.171.83"]

address = EmailVeracity::Address.new('[email protected]')

address.valid?
# => false

address.errors
# => [:no_address_servers]

As you can see, playing with the core library is pretty fun. The basic building blocks are:

Address

Responsible for parsing full email addresses and checking for pattern-based validity.

Domain

Contains methods to query the domain for information.

Resolver

Abstracts Resolv::DNS into a super-simple single public method, this is where the timeout error is raised.

Rails 3 Validator

Rails 3 Validator now included.

validates :email, :email_veracity => true 

You can also validate with options.

validates :email, :email_veracity => { :option => value } 

Validation Options

skip_lookup (false)

When set to true, the domain is not checked for a valid server or MX record. This is definitely faster, but will accempt obvious typos like '[email protected]'

timeout (2)

Set the timeout for DNS lookup (in seconds).

enforce_whitelist (true)

Don't look up servers we already know about. The included whitelist includes: aol.com, gmail.com, hotmail.com, me.com, mac.com, msn.com, rogers.com, sympatico.ca, yahoo.com, telus.com, sprint.com, sprint.ca

enforce_blacklist (false)

Don't allow email addresses that are from common spam hosts. Blacklist includes: dodgeit.com, mintemail.com, mintemail.uni.cc, 1mintemail.mooo.com, spammotel.com, trashmail.net

valid_pattern (see config.rb)

A regular expression to check addresses against.

must_include ([])

Set which records are required to be searched for lookup. Options include :a and :mx. When left empty, both A and MX are searched.