how do you check if email address is working?

Question

1. is there any way to check if an email is active without sending it an email? (meaning that it does not get returned)
2. if i have 20,000 emails in my email list, and i do decide to send all of them an email, how can automatically cross out the email address that got returned?

Answer 1

1. No.
2. Depends on how you are sending them. (Please provide more details)

Answer 2

There used to be a way to query a mail server if an email address is valid. However, since spammers used that facility for ill purposes, almost no mail servers will support that method anymore.

All you can hope to do is a DNS lookup on the email domain to see if the domain is valid.

Answer 3

Sending an email and requesting the user click some sort of activation link is the best way to determine if the email address is valid, and being used by someone. If you just want to see if the email is valid whether or not its registerd or active, use a Regex.

As for crossing them out, where are the emails stored? If its in a database, just set an activation key and a flag saying whether the link has been visited or not.

Answer 4

1. No
2. You need mailing list management software. Lyris Listmanager is a paid one that has automatic bounce handling and removes users from your list. There are several free ones that doe the same thing: ezmlm, mailman, majordomo and many others. You probably don't want to just send all those emails without a piece of MLM software to manage it. you will probalby get blacklisted fromservers. You need things like unsubscribe handling or you won't be sending emails for long.

Answer 5

These days, you can't know if the email address is valid. The domain is about as far as you'll get and you can do a reverse lookup on that to see if that is valid. But it won't tell you about the user.

What you need is something to process the bounces from your mail out and write some sort of script to perhaps update the list. There are many tools under Linux for this type of purpose such as procmail. Theres a port of that for windows I think.

Answer 6

Heh. if you could find out a way, the answer would be worth billions to spammers.

The best answer here is: No.

Answer 7

I would feel slightly strange helping you with this. You could be a spammer - any non-spamming mailer would simply ask their list to confirm that they'd like to keep receiving updates.