How do I verify an email address.

[Greg Turney]

Hello all,

I have a web site that collects user information and one item
is their email address. I find people often enter this information wrong and I am looking for a way to test if an
email address is valid before I let the user move onto the
next part of their registration.

Is there some kind of "sendmail" command that can vallidate
an email address?

Thanks in advance!

Greg Turney
greg.turney@bell.ca

[Steffi Jones_1]

Hello,

I don't know sendmail, but I saw something similiar on a cgi script webpage .

There are several webpages where you can free cgi scripts.

i.e.: www.cgi101.com or www.cgiscripts.com
I'm sure you will find more out there

Take care, Steffi Jones

[Bengt Karlsson]

Hi,
There's a program called vrfy which I found very handy when checking e-mail addresses in scripts:
http://hpux.cict.fr/hppd/hpux/Networking/Admin/vrfy-99.05.11/
Regards,
Bengt

[Herve BRANGIER]

Hi,

You can use a script which connect to the
mail server and use SMTP commands like :
.VRFY : verify an e-mail address, generaly
on the local mail server.
.EXPN : expand e-mail address, usefull to
know all the members of an alias (like mailling
list for example).

But a lot of recents mail servers refuse
this kind of command. But there is another
method : try to send a mail, when mail servers refuse this kind of commands sometimes they
"say" that....

You can find informations on sendmail sites
and reading RFC 821 (SMTP standard)
http://www.pasteur.fr/infosci/RFC/8xx/821

Herve