Unfortunately, even this isn't a panacea, since the VRFY command is not a
required command, it too is often not implemented. To my knowledge the only
sure way to know if an email address is valid is to send it mail.
(*Chris*)
----- Original Message -----
From: Craig R. McClanahan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 1999 1:14 PM
Subject: Re: Help on Email Validation
> Rod McChesney wrote:
>
> > Bear in mind that whois often returns false negatives, because it's a
> > huge security breach to allow random outsiders to skim your list of
> > email accounts. For instance, I believe most corporate email systems
> > refuse whois requests. You should probably try whois out on a sample
> > of your actual user base to see how many could have been validated
> > this way, and whether it's worth doing.
> >
> > Rod McChesney, Korobra
> >
>
> The better way to validate users's EMAIL addresses would be to use the
verify
> (VRFY) command already present in the SMTP protocol used to transport
Internet
> email. The protocol is pretty simple, and is outlined in RFC 821. It's
probably
> a 50-liner to do the remote validation using sockets, given an email
address as
> an argument.
>
> Craig McClanahan
>
>
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