We are looking to improve our marketing email list by preventing fake emails from entering in the first place. We want to confirm that an email address exists (and that there is actually a mailbox for that email address).
Does anyone know of any services or components to validate an email address?
Hi Jeff, the following regular expression is an example of how you could validate an email address is in the correct general format:
(\w+@[a-zA-Z_]+?\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6})
For security reasons, very few email servers provide a function to remotely validate whether or not a mailbox exists, so it is very unlikely a service could provide this information with any reliability.
Hope this helps!
Adam
It would be quite trivial to do this yourself.
Create a webform where the user can type in their email address. You could protect it with a captcha to prevent bots from hitting it.
On submission, save the email address to a database along with a GUID, DateTime timestamp and IsActivated bit. The GUID uniquely identifies this subscription. The timestamp states an expiry time that the email address must be confirmed by.
Send an email to the email address with a URL in it like.
If user receives the email in their inbox & clicks the validation link before the timestamp for that GUID/Email expires, then you activate their account.
At regular intervals you could have a job remove rows from the table that have never been activated where the activation window has expired.
You can't really validate an email address without sending a message to it, and perhaps not even then (you may or may not get an error response or error message).
And if you're sending an email to validate it, you're probably going to irritate your recipients, unless you add value in that email.
The normal way of doing this is to send an email to the address you're given, which contains a unique link which when the user visits it, confirms that the user had received the email and (presumably) really wants your email in future. Was this what you meant, or did you really want to validate the message without sending an email to the user?
If it is, there are any number of list managers that can do this (for instance, Gnu mailman). Searching for "email list managers" shows up many more, including firms that will manage the list for you.
There are several levels of email validation and I've got source to do them all. However, I despise your line of business and would never share them with you...
Just to clarify - I don't despise you, Jeff... Just your line of business.
Here is an article on what we want to do: http://www.coveryourasp.com/ValidateEmail.asp
We want to do DNS Validation and SMTP Validation. We already have Simple Validation in place.
I found these two components:
We most likely will be going with one of them. Probably go with aspNetMx from Advanced Intellect (at least that is where I am leaning right now). The sample test on http://www.aspnetmx.com/demo.aspx worked for my email addresses (valid and not valid).
And will probably just go with DNS Validation and not SMTP validation since a couple comments have indicated that SMTP validation is not 100% accurate and also the amount of delay that occurs with SMTP validation.
-Jeff