On 17 Sep 2008, at 14:20, Tom Chubb wrote:
Can anyone offer advice on best practices for email address
verification?
Obviously for user registration it's common to click a link in your
email to
complete the process thereby verifying the email, but if you want
to keep
things very simple for the end user, what are the best methods?
Send them an email with a verification link - it's the only 100%
accurate way and most people will have come across this requirement
on other sites.
I have been looking at getmxrr and the examples feature some good
advice,
etc.
One that I've found that I'm thinking of using is
http://www.tienhuis.nl/php-email-address-validation-with-verify-
probe which
tries to connect to the SMTP server as well as mx lookup, etc.
How reliable are these?
They're not for reasons already mentioned by other posters. Also you
need to consider how often you'll be doing this. I implemented this
check on one of my sites and I very quickly hit auto-bans on Hotmail,
Gmail and Yahoo mail servers. They don't like it when you make lots
of connections to their servers without sending anything!
With new domain name extensions appearing all the time I wanted to
find
something better than a regex which might become outdated after a
while and
I'd never know about it!
In that case you need to make your regex loose enough to handle that,
or keep on top of it manually. Either way you're better off just
sending them a verification email.
-Stut
--
http://stut.net/
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