Determining the health / validity of an email address

Question

Regular maintenance on the website often includes checking that the links are valid, bad links marked, etc.

I know how to map email addresses using a script (especially in the context of the webpage where they are in mailto: links. My question is, how can I verify that they are in order without sending out the address?

Disabling the domain and checking its listening on port 25 is a partial response, but does not handle checking the username / alias.

Is there a way to add this to my maintenance scripts for websites that I manage?

I don’t care what language it is written in while it works :)

Answer 1

Agree with Jay : All the great features created to do this particular job are usually disabled ...

The only way to send an email to this address; and even then you are not 100% sure.

• This address may be garbage; nobody checks it.
• Your mailbox is full (temporarily?) And you get a DSN
• SMTP Server Errors / Failures

IMHO, continue to check the domain (easily connect to connections if you do not want to be blacklisted), and anti-spam tools such as akismet / spamhaus to filter user subscriptions.

Answer 2

SMTP used to have a “VRFY” command that asked the server if it considered the username to be valid. Now everyone has disconnected to prevent spam.

It was also possible to start sending emails "MAIL FROM: ...", "RCPT TO: ...", and the receiving server will inform you immediately after RCPT TO if the address was Nothing good. This does not work either.

This is a long, perverted way of saying, “No, I don’t think there is a way to do this without actually sending an email.”

Answer 3

It depends on how much you need it, as in an earlier answer you can use the SMTP server interface through a script. Then it will be so accurate, and even if you send an email, it may not always be 100% accurate, some SMTP servers can accept this email, but then drop it, or some email addresses may not be used, but still receive mail.

There is no replacement for manual execution; you can only get a certain level of confidence through automation, but not 100%.

Answer 4

The best way to do this is to wait until you have a normal email address to send to the subscription list, and indicate in it a request for those who want to stay on the list to fill out the form within a reasonable period of time. After that, you can simply assume that those who did not respond do not want more mail and delete them.