Re: [MacPerl] Verifying email addresses

[Paul Schinder <schinder@pobox.com>]

At 4:03 PM -0400 8/4/00, Joseph Erickson wrote:
>Is there anyway to verify an email before sending a message out?  What I
>would like to do is get an email, like firstclown@yahoo.com, then ask the
>server yahoo.com if firstclown is a valid user name for email.

No, there isn't.  The only reliable way is to send the mail and see 
if it bounces.  If it does, you know something is wrong with the 
address, or that the addressee is refusing it.  If it doesn't, you 
don't know what happened.

>
>This would really help me in checking emails before sending out subscriber
>lists.  You wouldn't believe how many people don't know their own email
>address.  If anyone else has had this problem, let me know how you handled
>it.

If you have access to a Unix box, you should consider using Dan 
Bernstein's ezmlm <http://pobox.com/~djb/ezmlm.html>.  It has a 
technique to automatically handle bounced messages so that you don't 
have to.  Most (all?) of the lists at perl.org are handled by it.

>-------------------------------
>J o s e p h   E r i c k s o n
>P u z z l e S m i t h
>
-- 
--
Paul Schinder
schinder@pobox.com

# ===== Want to unsubscribe from this list?
# ===== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-request@macperl.org