Swot :blossom:

If you have a product or service and need to know whether an email address belongs to an academic institution, there's a chance there's some manual component to the approval process or a you have a high false positive/negative rate. Perhaps .edu email addresses are automatically approved because, for the most part at least, they're associated with American post-secondary educational institutions. Perhaps .ac.uk email addresses are automatically approved because they're guaranteed to belong to British universities and colleges. Unfortunately, not every country has an education-specific TLD (Top Level Domain) and plenty of schools use .com or .net.

Swot is a community-driven or crowdsourced library for verifying that domain names and email addresses are tied to a legitimate university of college - more specifically, an academic institution providing higher education in tertiary, quaternary or any other kind of post-secondary education in any country in the world. Swot-bloom builds on this by creating a bloom filter from the Swot collection of institutional emails that can be serialised and easily used for client side verification.

Pop quiz: Which of the following domain names should be eligible for an academic discount? stanford.edu, america.edu, duep.edu, gla.ac.uk, wunizar.es, usask.ca, hil.no, unze.ba, fu-berlin.de, ecla.de, bvb.de, lsmu.com. Answers at the foot of the page.

Installation

npm install swot-bloom

Usage

Verify Email Addresses

import checkEmail from 'swot-bloom';
checkEmail('[email protected]'); // true

Regenerating the bloom filter

If you want to generate a new bloom filter with different size/false positive rates that can be done by running:

npm run generateFilter *m/n* *k*

For further information on the parameters see Bloom Filters - the math.

Known Issues

• You can search by email and domain names only. You cannot search by IP.
• You don't know if the email address belongs to a student, faculty, staff member, alumni, or a contractor.
• There may be a few false positives, missing institutions... maybe even a couple of typos. Contributions welcome! Please contribute domain information to the original swot project that this is forked from.
• Using a bloom filter means that there is some chance of false positives i.e. that an email address is an institutional address when it is not. I've chosen a false positive rate of ~0.5% so the bloom filter isn't too large and can be used client-side. If this isn't acceptable, consider using swot-js. However swot-bloom is tested against 127 common non-academic email domains, non of which result in a false positive.

Please note: just because someone has verified that they own [email protected] does not mean that they're a student. They could be faculty, staff, alumnni, or maybe even an external contractor. If you're suddenly getting a lot of traffic from websites like FatWallet or SlickDeals, you might want to find out why. If you're suddenly getting a lot of requests from a particular school, you should look into that too. It may be good business, word of mouth, or someone may have found a loophole. Swot gives you a high confidence level - not a guarantee. I recommend putting some controls in place or at least monitor how it's doing from time to time.

Pop Quiz Answers

Hopefully, you'll be surprised by some of this:

| Domain | Academic? | Comments | |--------|-----------|----------| |stanford.edu|:heavy_check_mark:|OK, this was an easy one so you could get at least one right| |america.edu|:heavy_multiplication_x:| Prior to October 29th 2001, anyone could register a .edu domain name (details) | |duep.edu|:heavy_check_mark:| Alfred Nobel University is a Ukranian University in the Ukraine i.e. not in the USA :us: | |gla.ac.uk|:heavy_check_mark:|Glasgow University in Scotland| |unizar.es|:heavy_check_mark:|The University of Zaragoza in Spain| |usask.ca|:heavy_check_mark:|The University of Saskatchewan in Canada| |hil.no|:heavy_check_mark:|Lillehammer University College in Norway| |unze.ba|:heavy_check_mark:|University of Zenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina| |fu-berlin.de|:heavy_check_mark:|Free University of Berlin in Germany| |ecla.de|:heavy_check_mark:|ECLA of Bard is a state recognized liberal arts university in Berlin, Germany | |bvb.de|:heavy_multiplication_x:|It's a soccer team from Germany| |lsmu.com|:heavy_check_mark:| Lugansk State Medical University in the Ukraine |

If you verified this by visiting all of the websites, how long did it take you? Did you have fun? Imagine you had to do this 10 - 100 times every day. Now you know a little something about the inspiration for Swot. Swot can verify them all in a fraction of a second and remove a :poop: part of someone's job.

See Also

• gman - like swot, but for government emails
• swotphp - PHP port of Swot
• swot - Ruby Swot
• swot-js - JS Swot