[thelist] Re: Checking to see that an email account exists

Tim Luoma luomat at peak.org
Wed Jul 17 11:28:01 CDT 2002


Joshua Olson wrote:

 > What I'm am looking to do is verify someone's email address from the
 > processing page of a signup form and scrub a list of emails to figure
 > out which ones are valid.

Depends what you mean by 'verify' and 'valid' :-)

Do you mean:
"I want to make sure that it doesn't bounce" or
"I want to make sure they gave me a real address" or
"I want to make sure they gave me an address I can use to communicate
with them later"

They're all different.

Doesn't bounce:
===============
I'll use 'nobody at yourdomain.com' if I have to give an email address, but
I'll never see any messages sent to it.

(C|Net thought they were being clever by checking for 'nobody@' in their
little email-validating javascript, so I just changed it to
'tips at cnet.com' only to discover that they didn't check to see if people
outside their domain were using their domain.)

A Real Email Address
====================
Well bill at microsoft.com is probably a real address, it's just not mine.
  Can I sign up others for your mailing list?  (I've got a list of
morons who can't figure out how to unsub from things that I would love
to share with your company :-)

User Must Respond to test email
===============================
So I know what you're thinking (other than "Man, Tim really doesn't know
how to write a *short* message, does he?"): "I'll send them an email
that they have to respond!  That way I'll be sure to get a valid email
address."  Well yes, but I'll just give you my Hotmail account which is
set to 'exclusive' so  that 99.9999% of all the messages go right to the
'junk' folder (which I will, in this case, just look for your
auto-respond message, do whatever I have to do, and leave your message
out of the filter so that other mail that you send to that account will
probably not be seen).

In conclusion (he said, to the relief of many):
	I've dealt with far too many 'You give us your email address and
*we'll* sign you up for our newsletter which you can opt-out of if you
login to our website and go through 5 pages first' to actually give
someone I don't know my real email address on a webpage (or on a mailing
list either for that matter, but that's another subject ;-)

TjL





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