isemailok.com: The Silent API

The Problem with Temporary Emails

We all know them. You want to try a service, but you don’t want to give them your real email address. So you Google “temp mail”, grab a disposable address, and sign up.

For developers and SaaS founders, these are a nightmare.

• You can’t contact the user effectively.
• They skew your analytics.
• They are rarely “real” users with intent to pay or engage long-term.

I wanted to solve this. I thought, “Devs don’t want these emails in their databases.”

The Cat and Mouse Game

The problem is that temporary email services are smart. They don’t just use one domain; they rotate them constantly to avoid simple blacklists.

So, I built a system to watch them.

The Solution: A Redis Watchtower

I crafted a backend system that would continuously monitor these temporary email generators. As soon as they spun up a new domain, my system would catch it and insert it into a Redis database.

The product itself was an API. Other developers could call my service during their user signup process:

GET /[email protected]

And my service would instantly respond, telling them if the email domain was known to be disposable, purely by checking against my real-time Redis list.

The Implementation

Implementation-wise, it was a joy. It was fast, efficient, and technically sound. I loved the architecture—a set of watchers feeding a high-performance data store, serving a lightning-fast API. It did exactly what it promised, and it did it well.

I was proud of the code.

The Silence

But here is where the story ends.

I never advertised it. I never spoke about it to people. I never launched on Product Hunt. I never wrote content about it (until now).

I built a tool that solved a real problem, but I treated it like a secret.

The Lesson

isemailok.com is a perfect example of the “Field of Dreams” fallacy: “If you build it, they will come.”

They didn’t come, because they didn’t know it existed.

Unlike EasyPageGo, which failed because of over-engineering and market misreading, isemailok failed simply because of silence. It was a valid product that died in the dark.

The lesson? You can build the fastest API in the world, appearing in Redis in milliseconds, but if you don’t tell the world about it, it might as well not exist.