Does anyone know of a means of checking email address (without actually sending an email and waiting for it to bounce)?
We have a list of emails that we know is out of date - instead of sending to all of them and ending up with several hundred returned emails clogging up our mail server, is there a way that we can check and prune the list before mailing people?
Any suggestions gratefully recieved…
Gp
There’s no quick way to do this because there is no central registry of email addresses.
A while back I talked to a company called Return Path who offered a service to manage our email, keep our email lists up to date based on bounce notices, etc. But this isn’t something where you just show up with a list one day and say, “Tell me which ones are still good.”
Thanks CookingWithGas - I thought there might not be a solution, but it was worth a shot…
Gp
Mail servers have a verification command that will allow someone to find out if an email address exists without actually sending an email to that person. Unfortunately, this command has often been abused by spammers, so most administrators disable it.
To verify an email address manually …
telnet samplemailserver.com 25
vrfy email - where “email” is first part of the email address before the @ symbol.
quit
If the response code is 550, the user may not exist. You can configure the VRFY command to function but always return an error code. If the response code is 250, the account exists.
Here’s a webapge that performs this check automatically:
Verify Email. There are programs that can do this in bulk, but I am not familiar with them. You should be able to figure out if some of the addresses are still valid, removing them from the “unknown” category.