LEAV Last Email Address Validator

LEAV – Last Email Address Validator by smings

We believe that your lifetime is the most precious and protection worthy thing in the universe. Protecting it is a critical task.
LEAV helps you to effectively protect your lifetime against spammers that use fake or disposable email adresses for the standard WordPress user registration, WordPress’s comments, WooCommerce, Elementor Pro, Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, WPForms (lite), Ninja Forms, Formidable Forms, Kali Forms and many more plugins to come.

LEAV works out of the box without the need to sign up or register and without the use of external APIs. All the action takes place fully within your control and on your own WordPress instance. No email address nor other form data has to be sent to an API outside your control.

We built this plugin, because we were frustrated with the lack of deep email validation beyond just superficial syntax checks in all the WordPress functions, plugins and form builders, that we used ourselves.

We created LEAV with a better feature set than most paid services like quickemailverification.com, antideo and others. But LEAV is for free! And it will stay free forever. If you still miss a plugin, that we do not yet support or another way of extra protection, please contact us at [email protected]. We are always happy to make LEAV better. Please have a look at our roadmap below for future plugin integrations.

Integrations

LEAV is the only free WordPress plugin that provides unlimited email address validations
and reliable disposable email address protection that seamlessly integrates with almost all of the big WordPress form plugins, form builders and WordPress standard functions.

Currently “Last Email Address Validator” integrates with:
* WordPress user registration
* WordPress comments
* WooCommerce tested up to 4.9.* (5,000,000+ installations)
* Contact Form 7 tested up to 5.3.* (5,000,000+ installations)
* WPForms (lite) tested up to 1.6.* (3,000,000+ installations)
* Ninja Forms tested up to 3.4.* (1,000,000+ installations)
* MailChimp for WordPress MC4WP tested up to 4.8.1 (1,000,000+ installations)
* Formidable Forms tested up to 4.09.* (300,000+ Installations)
* Elementor Pro tested up to 3.0.* (est. 150,000+ Pro Installations)
* Gravity Forms tested up to 2.5.* (est. 100,000+ Installations)
* Kali Forms tested up to 2.2.* (30,000+ installations)

which gives LEAV a current plugin reach of 15mio+ WordPress installations. And these numbers only cover the freely available plugin installation numbers from the plugin directory on WordPress.org/plugins and some reasonable guesses for the commercial plugin installations.

If your plugin has a newer version than listed – don’t worry! Our integrations are extremely stable and are very unlikely to break when the supported plugins are being updated.

Additionally to the email validation and filter features, LEAV let’s you control whether you want to allow pingbacks & trackbacks.
Pingbacks and trackbacks unfortunately don’t come with email addresses that could be
validated:
* WordPress Trackbacks
* WordPress Pingbacks

Roadmap

We are currently working on integrating the following plugins:

• OptinMonster API (1,000,000+ installations)
• Popup Maker (500,000+ installations)
• Newsletter (300,000 installations)
• Caldera Forms (200,000+ installations)
• Popup Builder (200,000+ installations)
• BuddyPress (200,000+ installations)
• Everest Forms (100,000+ installations)
• MailPoet 2 (100,000+ installations)
• MailPoet 3 (100,000+ installations)
• Form Maker (100,000+ installations)
• MailChimp (100,000+ installations)
• Ultimate Member (100,000+ installations)
• Easy Forms for Mailchimp (100,000+ installations)
• Email Subscribers & Newsletters (100,000+ installations)
• Free & Simple Contact Form (100,000+ installations)
• Hustle (90,000 installations)
• Forminator (80,000+ installations)
• Visual Form Builder (70,000+ installations)
• Popups – WordPress Popup (60,000+ installations)
• Newsletter, SMTP, Email marketing and Subscribe forms (50,000+ installations)
• User Registration (50,000+ installations)
• Subscribe2 (40,000+ installations)
• Icegram – Popups, Optins, CTAs & lot more… (40,000+ installations)
• Gwolle Guestbook (40,000+ installations)
• Happy Forms (30,000+ installations)
• Contact Form Maker (30,000+ installations)
• ConvertKit (30,000+ installations)
• Fluent Forms (30,000+ installations)
• Popup by Supsystic (30,000+ installations)
• WP Subscribe (30,000+ installations)
• weForms (20,000+ installations)
• WP User Frontend (20,000+ installations)
• CaptainForm (20,000+ installations)
• Clean and Simple Contact Form (20,000+ installations)
• Contact Form by Supsystic (20,000+ installations)
• Contact Form Email (20,000+ installations)
• Lead Form Builder (20,000+ installations)
• MailMunch (20,000+ installations)
• Ultimate Form Builder Lite (20,000+ installations)
• WP WooCommerce Mailchimp (20,000+ installations)
• MC4WP: Mailchimp Top Bar (10,000+ installations)
• Email Before Download (10,000+ installations)

When we finish this list, we’ll be able to serve up to ~20mio+ installations.
Please help us spread the word and recommend our plugin to others and leave us an
honest review. It might take some time to set up the validation and filter settings. Please trust us, it is more than worth your while doing so …

Features

LEAV – Last Email Address Validator by smings validates email addresses through a sophisticated multi-step validation process:

• Email address syntax check – checks if the email address is syntactically correct. This syntax check is more thorough than the typical frontend-based (javascript) validation of your forms plugin. It is a solid server-side email syntax check based on regular expressions (always on). By the way – there are top-level domains like “.CANCERRESEARCH” and even longer ones out there. The currently longest top-level domain is 18 characters long and most email syntax checks don’t allow this. For a current list of allowed top level domains look at iana.org.

• Blocking recipient name catch-all email addresses like (i.e. [email protected]) (optional)

• User-defined domain whitelist with wildcard support (optional)

• User-defined email address whitelist (optional)

• User-defined recipient name whitelist with wildcard support (optional)

• User-defined domain blacklist with wildcard support (optional)

• Blocking of disposable email address (DEA) or temporary email address services – if activated checks and filters out DEAs . The list gets frequently updated and blocks the main domains, their underlying mail exchange (MX) server domains as well as the MX server IP addresses. This ensures that you don’t get duped by a simple domain alias that routes its MX entries to the same DEA MX servers. (optional)

• Blocking of free email address providers from built-in domain list. This is a feature for those who only want to collect business email addresses. (optional)

• User-defined email address blacklist (optional)

• User-defined recipient name blacklistlist with wildcard support (optional)

• Built-in role-based recipient name blacklistlist with wildcard support (optional)

• DNS MX record check – checks if the domain of the email address is DNS resolvable and has at least one MX server (MX = Mail eXchange) record (always on)

• Simulated sending of an email to one of the MX servers. If this siumulation fails, we know that your WordPress instance could not send an email to the email address. Therefore we reject such email addresses (optional)

• Blocking of catch-all domains (optional)

If an email address passes through all of these tests, we know for sure, that it is a real email address that your WordPress instance can deliver emails to. This will reduce spam significantly. No matter how good LEAV works, we still
encourage you to use additional spam protection by using reCATCHAs (i.e. googles reCAPTCHA v3 that
is invisible except for a little banner that has to be added (at least on the form pages), honeypots and/or other means to protect your valuable lifetime.

After all – all the above tests just verify the email address’s correctness and deliverability, but it doesn’t prove that the person in front of the computer entering the email address has access to it.

This check is part of our LEAV PRO version. LEAV’s PRO version verifies that the person entering the email address has access to the email address. By connecting the email address with the person interacting with your WordPress website, you can reduce the amount of SPAM even further. We try to automatically integrate a so-called honeypot feature to all supported plugins and additionally we will add RBL (Real Time Black) checks, to make your contact forms / online forms as safe as possible.

But even after all this, you’ll probably be bothered every now and then. But you’ll save a ton of your precious lifetime with the above checks provided by LEAV.

Origins

The inspiration for this plugin stems from the plugin wp-mail-validator.
Since this plugin only supported the standard WordPress registration, comments and
Trackbacks/Pingbacks, we took the code and extended it to work with Contact Form 7 as well as WooCommerce. The original code was not following best practices and had other shortcomings. So with version 1.3.0 we decided to completely rewrite everything and did a major code refactoring. This allowed us to have a solid foundation for a lot more supported WordPress plugins to come.

If you need “LEAV – Last-Email-Address-Validator” to integrate with a plugin you use, feel free to contact us at [email protected] for feature requests. Before you do so, please check with our road map to see if it is already listed.

Installation

Installation from within your WordPress installation

1. Go to Plugins -> Add New
2. Search for Last Email Address Validator
3. Click on the Install Now button
4. Click on the Activate Plugin button

Manual installation

1. Go to wordpress.org/plugins/last-email-address-validator/
2. Click on Download – this downloads a zip file
3. Extract the zip file. It contains the directory last-email-address-validator
4. Upload the extracted plugin directory into the ~/wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress installation. Afterwards you should have a directory ~/wp-content/plugins/last-email-address-validator filled with the contents of the plugin code
5. Go to Plugins in your WordPress installation (menu item in the left sidebar)
6. Activate Last Email Address Validator plugin in the plugin list
7. For using translations, you can optionally copy the language files from ~/wp-content/plugins/last-email-address-validator/languages/*.mo and *.po to ~/wp-content/languages/plugins/

Configuration

Fresh after installing LEAV, you find LEAV as a menu item right in your main menu. Afterwards you can move the LEAV menu item into the WordPress settings menu. In this case you find Last Email Address Validator‘s settings under Settings -> Last Email Address Validator.
By default all relevant features are activated and set to the highest level of spam protection.
You should not need to adjust anything unless you want to deactivate options, want to use white/blacklists or further tweak the settings to your individual needs.

Help us help you

We are sure that you’ll appreciate the extra level of spam protection provided by Last Email Address Validator (LEAV) by smings.
We take great pride in the fact that it is the only plugin to support all major WordPress form plugins out of the box for free. We believe that everyone deserves to get his lifetime SPAM protected. So LEAV isn’t limited in the number of validations it does for you. The author, Dirk Tornow, has a baby girl and a rascal toddler that need daycare and much more. Therefore we ask you to show him your appreciation by considering a one-time donation via PayPal or by becoming a patreon.
This will help us help you and gives you good karma points!

Limitations of the free plugin

None – there aren’t any. LEAV validates as many email addresses as your WordPress instance can handle. It makes sure that all entered email addresses are deliverable and confirm to the rules you set. No sign-up, no registration, no API keys necessary. No email address will leave your server. LEAV is 100% made with love in Berlin, Germany.

For those who need more protection and more validations, we currently develop the pro version of LEAV. The pro version of LEAV validates, that the person entering the email address has actual access and control over the email account. It does this by sending a verification code to the entered email address and provides the user who entered the email address with a verification step before the form data gets send to the underlying plugin. No matter the plugin. LEAV pro supplies the functionality for all supported plugins.
Additionally LEAV pro will do Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) checks to make sure the email address entered is not from known spammer domains. And this will be as affordable as 2 starbucks coffees per year.