Michael, Thanks for your help! Your advice entirely makes sense. Perhaps a good way to use email verification is to alert the user that the address could not be verified, but if they insist, they can still submit it.
This probably falls under the 90/10 rule... I'll spend 90% of my time trying to fix a problem that occurs 10% (or less) of the time ;) Thanks for the Zend referral. I'll give it a try. Steven J. Walker Walker Effects www.walkereffects.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Sunday, February 24, 2002, at 11:31 AM, Michael Kimsal wrote: > Steven Walker wrote: >> Does anybody know any good ways (or available code) for verifying >> email addresses? >> Checking syntax is not enough.. I'd like to actually be able to test >> whether the email address exists. > > > Nothing is 100%, so don't exclude people because you can't verify them. > > There are 2 types of email addresse: > > verifiable > unverifiable > > The 'type' is determined by talking to the mail host of the domain, but > this is, at best, an inexact science. > > Verifiable means that you've connected to the mail host and indicated > you had mail for a specific user account and it did not reply back > 'user unknown'. That is the best you can hope for, because once that > mail system accepts it for delivery, it may still not be delivered to > the end user for a number of reasons - no mailbox space left, for > example. Or in fact, the specific user account DOESN'T exist, but the > mail server is set to accept all incoming mail first, and does more > precise error checking at a later time. > > Unverifiable would mean that the mail server will actually tell you up > front that an account doesn't exist, or isn't accepting mail from you, > or has a full mailbox, or whatever. > > So you might be able to tell if an account specifically DOES NOT exist, > but you can never be certain that an account actually does exist > without completely sending a mail, and hoping that it'll bounce to the > right place if there's a problem. > > The way to do this is to use SMTP to talk to the other mail host - Zend > has some code snippets like the one referenced below (probably others, > but here's a starting point) > > http://www.zend.com/codex.php?id=449&single=1 > > Hope that helps some... > > > > > -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
