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‘Stop Forum Spam’ Email Blacklist Check in DEVA

Posted on by Dilli Labs
StopForumSpam.com maintains a list of known malicious emails used for spam in blogs, forums and wikis. Beginning today, Dilli Email Validation API (DEVA) has added a new validation rule to check an email address against the StopForumSpam’s email blacklist to ensure that ‘bad guys’ are kept at bay from your website. This further enhances already existing advanced email validation capabilities of DEVA to help eliminate spammers from eavesdropping on your websites or other applications. Learn more about DEVA here.

DEVA now detects Disposable Email Addresses

Posted on by Dilli Labs

DEVA (Dilli Email Validation API) now includes the ability to detect and flag Disposable a.k.a Throwaway a.k.a Temporary email addresses.

Disposable Email Address (DEA) is a temporary email address that is primarily intended for owners to hide their real email address. Users can request such an address from DEA providers like mailinator.com. This address is ephemeral – it expires after a short period. It is used by real users to circumvent a registration process where email is required without providing their actual email address. Depending on the provider, some of these addresses can be public as well, i.e anyone can access its inbox. For ex: Click here to see the public inbox of fake@mailinator.com.

While initially invented to safeguard privacy, disposable addresses are now being actively abused to submit invalid data via web forms and such. Email broadcasting is a great marketing tool for genuine businesses who like to send periodic notifications to its list subscribers. Having throwaway email addresses in your recipient list means greater bounce rate given the temporary nature of such addresses. Given the frivolous nature of such addresses, its best to not have any DEA addresses in your subscription list.

Another example where such addresses can do harm to your business reputation is if your business is in the lead generation industry. Imagine selling a lead with email fake@mailinator.com to your lead customers? Such an occurrence can do some serious damage to your relationship with them.

In summary, having disposable email addresses in new leads or opportunities can do serious harm to businesses. It may hurt your conversion rate and business reputation.

Starting today, we have integrated a validation rule in Dilli Email Validation API (DEVA) to detect disposable addresses and mark them as invalid. We actively maintain a list of 3000+ disposable email address providers that we check an email domain against to ensure its not disposable. Here are a few ways one can leverage DEVA to stop disposable addresses from making through to you:

‘Country Game’ – an Amazon Alexa Skill Game – Released

Posted on by Dilli Labs

Dilli Labs is excited to announce the release of ‘Country Game‘ – An Amazon Alexa Skill Game that helps to build vocabulary of country names in kids and adults alike. To get started, simply enable ‘Country Game’ skill and say Alexa, play Country Game.

To enable this skill on your Amazon Alexa devices :

  1. Open the Alexa app, go to the menu, and select Skills.
  2. Browse for skills by category or use Search. This skill is named ‘Country Game‘. You can find it under the category Games, Trivia and Accessories -> Knowledge and Trivia.
  3. When you find a skill you want to use, select it to open the skill detail page. Then select the Enable Skill option.

Take turns saying country names with this skill. A country name should begin with the last letter of the previous country name spoken. For ex: if this skill responds with a country name ‘Sweden’, you have to say a country name starting with letter ‘N’ (last letter in word Sweden). When either you or the skill is unable to think of a country name, the game ends. The skill also randomly educates you about countries by telling a fun fact about them during the course of the game. For ex : if you say ‘Netherlands’, it may tell you a fun fact about it like “Did you know that around 20% of Netherlands is located below sea level?”

This skill keeps a score of your performance based on the number of countries you say in a game. You can also query your worldwide rank. The goal is to help you practice your vocabulary of country names in a fun and competitive way.

Motivation

We developed this skill to enter into the Amazon Alexa Kids Challenge. This skill and game is kid-friendly.

Architecture

The skill backend is hosted as a Lambda function on AWS and interfaces with DynamoDB for persistence.

Want to develop your own Alexa Skill ? Contact us by filling the form below






Dilli Email Validation API : An Alternative to Mailgun

Posted on by Dilli Labs

Mailgun is a great email address validation API that we once recommended and used. However, the recent decision by Mailgun to turn on the pricing switch has eroded a lot of its loyal users’ trust and confidence. Existing users are searching for alternatives to Mailgun for a cheaper and better solution. We were in a similar boat and hopped on to another email address validation service called Mailboxlayer which turned out to be very unreliable. This prompted us to create a new product in-house that will be far more superior than any email validation API in the market with fair pricing. Thus, Dilli Email Validation API (DEVA) was born.

DEVA is a simple API to check if a given email address is real without sending a verification email. Some of the factors used to determines validity of an email address are as follows :

  • Format Validation : DEVA ensures that email address is valid. Ex : email addresses with missing @ are not valid.
  • MX Records’ Existence : DEVA validates that MX records exist for the domain tied to the email address.
  • ESP (Email Service Provider) Grammar Rules: Ex : @yahoo.com emails cannot have user part less than 4 characters. We learn new ESP grammar rules every now and then and incorporate into our validation algorithm.
  • Profanity Check : This is a distinguishing feature of DEVA. It checks email addresses for profanities and marks them invalid if found. Ex : f***you@gmail.com may be a valid email address but is marked invalid by DEVA because no sane person would use that.
  • Patterns : There are countless patterns we discovered while validating over 50,000 emails every month for our clients that are obviously invalid emails. Ex : jondoe@gmail.com, foobar@gmail.com, noemail@gmail.com, etc.  DEVA is constantly learning and building up the black listed patterns as our user base grows.
  • Disposable/Temporary address: Whether or not an email address is a disposable/temporary address such as @mailinator in which case its treated as invalid.
  • Role-based address: Whether or not an email address is role-based, like info@, help@, support@ in which case its treated as invalid.
  • Blacklisted Domains : Ex: example.com is reserved and can’t be used in practice. Therefore, all emails having this domain are marked invalid by DEVA.

1000 email address validations will cost $8 with Mailgun but only $5 with DEVA.

Get Started with DEVA

Sign Up now and get your API key.

Learn More

Thanksgiving Special – FREE Web Hosting for Farmers – 07/23 – 07/26

Posted on by Dilli Labs
At Dilli Labs, “Farmers” are our role models. They work hard regardless of the situation and are disciplined – qualities we deploy in our own work culture. Therefore, this Thanksgiving, we are thanking them by announcing FREE web hosting for websites for farmers forever. We will migrate your site, host it on our servers and never charge you a penny !  No catch 22, no gimmicks – its as simple – you work hard and inspire us. Its the pay back time.

Conditions :

  1. Participants should prove that they are a farmer. An easy way to do so is to send us your current website.
  2. No Migration costs.
  3. Site should run with PHP 7, MySQL (we can evaluate for FREE if this is the case).
  4. Site size is less than 5GB. (we can evaluate for FREE if this is the case).
  5. Open to all farmers throughout the world.
  6. Offer valid till supplies last. First come First Serve.
  7. Offer ends 11:59 pm PDT, 07/26/2017 (mm/dd/yyyy)

Where are your servers and how are they ?

Our servers are co-located in San Francisco in a data center served by high bandwidth internet connection.

How to Participate ?

Simply send an email to info@dillilabs.com to get started. We will contact you.  

Media Server (Red5) Hosting for existing HDFVR users

Posted on by Dilli Labs
NuSoft recently announced that they will cease to support HDFVR – a popular flash based video recording platform for web applications – by end of 2017. You can find the official announcement on their blog here. NuSoft plans to instead sell Pipe – a new video recording platform that they plan to offer as SaaS (Software As A Service). The basic service sells for $50/mo . The ‘pro’ service for $200/mo. See more details here. They are also winding up their popular media server hosting service that cost b/w $15/month to $150/mo. This move disrupts services for existing users of HDFVR especially those leveraging the media server hosting services provided by NuSoft. Moving to Pipe is an expensive deal since they need to hire integration experts and also hop on to the monthly plan. Another alternative is to continue using HDFVR on your website with your own VPS/cloud media server. Dilli Labs is here to help you with this option. We now offer Red5 media server hosting for as low as $15/mo. We can also migrate your existing media to our server and configure your web application to move to new media server hosting. Interested ? Contact us now for more details at support@dillilabs.com.  

Introducing DEVIL (Detection and Exclusion of Vulgar and Improper Language) API

Posted on by Dilli Labs
Are you in the lead generation business ? Leads containing profanity are most likely spam leads. They go undetected coming from clean IPs with valid content. Since they go undetected, they unfortunately make it to your recipient and do much harm to the trust and thus your business. At Dilli Labs LLC, we advice that you validate your lead content for profanity using our following API and prevent sending the lead to your recipients if the lead contains vulgar keywords. DEVIL (Detection and Exclusion of Vulgar and Improper Language) is a simple profanity filter REST API for developers that determines whether text contains profanity or not. Click here for Demo, Usage and Pricing information.
WPHLiveTV Handball News - Alexa Flash Briefing Skill

Alexa Skill – WPHLiveTV Handball News

Posted on by Dilli Labs

Dilli Labs is excited to have launched an Amazon Alexa flash briefing skill – WPHLiveTV Handball News – for its client – WPHLiveTV.  The skill enables Handball fans to listen to the latest news & information from around the world of handball, courtesy of WPHLiveTV. Up-to-date tournament scores, post match recaps and previews– all updated throughout the week.

The system we developed for WPHLiveTV gives them the ability to upload audio MP3 files and mark them active or inactive. The skill automatically retrieves the active uploaded audio files and plays them when it is invoked.

Here is a demo :

Read our client’s testimonial :

We hired Piyush Hari because of his extensive background work with Alexa App Construction and Development; however, it’s apparent that Mr. Hari has a wide array of talents related to the Techie Field, Today’s evolution of web-based info and modern/progressive/innovative industrial sciences. So much so, that I will be contacting his office first before consulting any other, regardless of our creative needs. Mr. Hari is more organized than any telecommunications/developer/programmer I’ve encountered and is very thorough, honest and ethical. Can I have him as my personal go-to-all and put him on the payroll please!??

Dave Vincent Executive Director, WPHLiveTV

Interested in building your flash briefing Alexa skill ? Contact Us Now