[ale] Validating email addresses

[Christopher Fowler]

I will also add that when I run my program on the data I do the
following.

1.  connect to remoet MX
2.  Issue EHLO
3.  MAIL FROM: <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com>
4.  RCPT TO: <01234567890 at domain.com>
    I do this to see if it will accept it.  If it
    does accept it I assume that I can't verify because it
    will give me a 250 for anything I send.

When I ran this on a segment of data 90% of them could not be validated
because of #4 above.  I've googled for many of the programs in windows
and it appears to me they all do what I'm doing.  I would assume they
would get similar results.


On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 18:00 -0400, Christopher Fowler wrote:
> Is there a way other than communicating with a remote SMTP server to
> validate an address?  Here is an example:
> 
> [cfowler at shuttle ~]$ telnet mx00-dom.earthlink.net 25
> Trying 207.217.125.16...
> Connected to mx00-dom.earthlink.net (207.217.125.16).
> Escape character is '^]'.
> 220 meadowlark.mail.pas.earthlink.net EL___ ESMTP EarthLink Mail Service
> Wed, 30 Aug 2006 14:58:42 -0700 (PDT)
> helo outpostsentinel.com
> 250 meadowlark.mail.pas.earthlink.net Hello outpostsentinel.com
> [66.23.224.81], please to meet you
> mail from:<cfowler at outpostsentinel.com>
> 250 <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com>... Sender ok
> rcpt to:<0123456789 at outpostsentinel.com>
> 250 <0123456789 at outpostsentinel.com>... Recipient ok
> vrfy
> 502 Command unrecognized "vrfy"
> quit
> 221 meadowlark.mail.pas.earthlink.net closing connection
> 
> 
> I'm the "catch all" for that domain.
> 
> I'm in the process of writing a program that will verify all email
> addresses stored in a database.  The problem is that when I use the 
> "0123456789@<domain>" email address _many_ of the servers are
> responding with a '250' even though no address like that exists.
> 
> Is there another way to verify?
> 
> 
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