Re: way to check an email without sending it??

[Jon Radel]

Gary Kline wrote:

        Hey Guys,

^^^^ Seen as a sexist assumption by some, but some consider gals to be guys.

        Is there a way I can tell that an email address, say


        is still valid without joe knowing that I am curious?  --And,
        yes, this isn't a FBSD-specific question... .

j...@foo.com

--

--Jon Radel
j...@radel.com

Depends heavily on how foo.com does things. Used to be, and still is some places, easy to tell by doing a raw SMTP connection and seeing what the receiving server did when you provided the destination address. That makes it real easy to harvest addresses by brute force, so these days many servers don't give you a hint unless you actually send some mail. Some don't even give you a hint then, simply black holing the mail if the address is incorrect.

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