Over the weekend, we had the opportunity to participate in a developer event organized by Intuit to devise a solution to help small businesses. We teamed up with Mr. Jeff Chen – a friend and a small business owner – and Ms. Puja M. Hari to make it easy for businesses to perform a physical inventory. We wrote an Action for Google Assistant named ‘Inventory Manager’ that helps update the quantity on hand for an item in Quickbooks via voice.
Continue reading “Physical Inventory Management via Google Assistant”Blog
Introducing ‘Dilli Forms’ Alexa Skill
We are delighted to announce that Amazon approved our newest Alexa skill – Dilli Forms. This skill lets you request any form pre-filled with your basic information such as name, address, phone and email address. Simply say – Alexa, ask Dilli Forms to get form <formname>. For ex: To get W-9 form, say Alexa, ask Dilli Forms to get form W-9. Within a few seconds, you will receive an email with the latest PDF version of the form pre-filled with your information. Save time and work smarter using Dilli Forms! Learn more about Dilli Forms Amazon Alexa skill.
“Dilli Labs” Alexa Skill Released!
https://www.amazon.com/Dilli-Labs-LLC/dp/B07DDCZ9CH
We are excited to announce an Amazon Alexa skill we created exclusively for clients of Dilli Labs! Its called ‘Dilli Labs’. Clients are issued a secret client code and a service name that they can use to invoke helper services like Broken Link Checking, creating HTML mark up for WordPress post from Vimeo APIs, requesting invoices, tax forms (W-9s), scheduling meetings, etc. To invoke the skill, simply say Alexa, open Dilli Labs and then follow the prompt. Become a Dilli Labs client now to make use of this skill! Check out Dilli Labs Alexa Skill. If you want to become a client or are an existing Dilli Labs client, and would like to suggest a service and/or get your client code, contact us by filling the form below:
DEVA now detects Role Based Email Addresses like admin@, info@, help@, support@
Dilli Email Validation API (DEVA) – the advanced email validation API – now has the ability to detect role-based email addresses such as info@, help@, store@, etc. It marks such email addresses as invalid. These addresses are not associated with an individual but rather with a department, company, or group. By default, this check is disabled. However, users may opt-in for including this check among many other validation checks. Reduce spam, bounce backs and increase business productivity by adopting DEVA now. Learn more about other validation checks and DEVA here.
‘Dilli Email Validator’ (DEV) WordPress Plugin v1.1.0.0 Released
Today, we are delighted to release a newer version (1.1.0.0) of Dilli Email Validator(DEV) WordPress plugin. Dilli Email Validator provides advanced validation for email form fields on WordPress sites using DEVA (Dilli Email Validation API). This newer version adds out of the box validation for email fields in forms built using Ninja Forms Wordpress plugin. Simply install, activate and configure DEV and get automatic email validation built into your WordPress sites so as to prevent malicious submissions and typographical errors. DEV already supports email form field validation in other popular form plugins like Contact Form 7, etc.
Amazon features ‘Doctor Pooch’ Alexa Skill
We are delighted to know that Amazon featured our ‘Doctor Pooch‘ Alexa Skill in their weekly email on Apr 8, 2018 to their subscribers. Doctor Pooch is an Amazon Alexa skill by Dilli Labs for dog owners and caretakers to find if their furry friends can eat certain foods. Simply say, Alexa, ask Doctor Pooch if dogs can eat <name of food> and get a well-researched response citing the source of the information and tips on feeding like amount and frequency.
Here’s a snippet:
Here’s the entire email. Jump to Page 2 to see ‘Doctor Pooch’.
[pdf-embedder url=”https://www.dillilabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Alexa-Skills-Always-ready-to-help-or-entertain.pdf”]
Here’s the entire email. Jump to Page 2 to see ‘Doctor Pooch’.
[pdf-embedder url=”https://www.dillilabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Alexa-Skills-Always-ready-to-help-or-entertain.pdf”]
‘Stop Forum Spam’ Email Blacklist Check in DEVA
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
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:
- If you own a WordPress website, simply install Dilli Email Validator plugin. All of your Newsletter subscription forms, Contact Forms, Login/Registration forms, etc will not allow use of disposable email addresses. OR
- If you have a Node.js application, simply use Dilli Email Validation npm package. OR
- For everything else, use DEVA (Dilli Email Validation API).
Dilli Email Validation API : An Alternative to Mailgun
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.