[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Shao Zhang) wrote: > I need to write a program to check if a given email address is > valid. I cannot simply send a message to the email address and > waiting for a bounce. > > The only way I can think is to telnet to the mail server on port > 25 and do a VFRY command. However, some mail servers are > configured not to allow such command. > > Is there any other way to do this??
I'm afraid the *only* reliable way to check if an e-mail address is valid is to try to send mail to it. There are simply too many cases. *Syntactically* valid, yes, you can do that, and even check that the domain has a mail server sitting on it, although there are many wrong ways to do it. For a good discussion of this, I strongly recommend reading the entry in the Perl FAQ on this subject, which you can find by typing: perldoc -q 'valid mail address' -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
