The new preview version 4.1 Release Candidate 1 is available for testing now.
Release plan
Unless issues are discovered that require postponing, this version will replace the current server installations in 2 weeks on the 20 February 2015.
How to access
Address: rc-api.nameapi.org
API versions: 4.0, 4.1
To connect, use the domain name rc-api.nameapi.org instead of the usual api.nameapi.org. It runs both the existing and unchanged 4.0 API as well as the new 4.1 API.
The client libraries for Java and PHP have been updated, see their respective GitHub pages. Or use the updated SOAP/WSDL API directly.
How to report issues
See the support page.
What happens if you do nothing
After the update in 2 weeks, your existing integration of NameAPI will continue to query the version 4.0 API, but on the new server installation. Everything should continue running as before. If you want to be absolutely sure, test the rc-api before the change.
API changes
The changes in version 4.1 are according to our service versioning guidelines. There are no breaking changes, therefore it should be safe and users are advised to switch to this new version.
New service emailnameparser2
A new service has been introduced: emailnameparser2.
It is almost identical to the (now deprecated) emailnameparser. The only difference is the email local-part classification: merged DEPARTMENT and TECHNICAL into FUNCTIONAL.
The email name parser tells what kind of address it is, for example PERSON_NAME if a name was found. There is a range of non-personal addresses; they used to be classified as DEPARTMENT (for example accounting@) and TECHNICAL (for example abuse@). The differentiation of the two categories wasn’t always simple. Is webmaster@ a department or technical? The RFC 2142 that defines some
local parts contains both kinds.
Therefore we have simplified this classification and merged the 2 kinds into FUNCTIONAL.
Improved functionality
These are behind-the-scenes changes and don’t affect the API itself.
Massively increased name database size
The service uses the latest version of the name database with
- thousands of newly added given names
- hundreds of thousands of newly added family names
- in Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Kanji and more
- thousands of attributes and relations added and improved
from various cultures around the world.
More email address classification
More disposable Email Addresses are detected.
Some providers of disposable email addresses change the domain names frequently.
This way the trash email addresses don’t raise alerts when comparing against static lists. And NameAPI was no different… until recently. Now there are mechanisms in place to collect and verify newly appearing domain names within hours.
If we are still missing one, let us know.
More functional email address local parts classified
Like info@ and sales@ in ~20 more languages.
More domains classified
More internationally important domains have been classified into the categories organization, isp etc.