Email verification?
I have a script that takes a users email address, as of late I have had alot of fake signups using email addresses that do not exist. What this means is that I have alot of unwanted email going out using some of my 500/hr limit. This is really a pain when I send out my newsletter. I get a ton of returned mail back.
My question is, is there a way to say ping the email address to see if it exisits or some other form of making the email addres is a valid account??
I don't know if this is the right place for this but maybe someone can help me any help would be great/
Smoothice
Busy posted this at 22:27 — 21st August 2006.
He has: 6,151 posts
Joined: May 2001
This is the right place as you need server side to validate the email address.
The biggest problem with validation of email addresses is the numbers of domains and countries. The basic email address is domain.com but if your in UK it would be domain.co.uk and I saw one the other day sub.domain.name.com. Then there are all the other ones, .bk, .us, .tk ... so unless you had a whole list of all valid domain extensions there isn't really a lot to validate against.
So validation is kind of out which leads me to your question. You say you have a sign up, change the sign up so it needs to be confirmed, process like as follows:
members comes to your site
signs up for newsletter or whatever
email gets sent to address for confirmation this is the correct address ...
person confirms info gets stored and used, no confirmation, details dropped
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