On Sat, 15 Jun 2002, Samuel W. Heywood wrote: > BTW, I would like to know if there is some way I could verify whether > "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" really is an email address that actually > exists.
There appears to be nothing running at that (TL) domain: $ nslookup first-trustees.com *** ns1.gwi.net can't find first-trustees.com: Non-existent host/domain After a bit of looking around though... $ telnet 195.166.232.1 25 Trying 195.166.232.1... Connected to 195.166.232.1. Escape character is '^]'. 220 linkserve.com ESMTP CommuniGate Pro 3.4.8 helo 250 linkserve.com domain name should be qualified help 214-Commands Supported: 214-HELO EHLO AUTH HELP QUIT MAIL NOOP RSET RCPT DATA ETRN VRFY STARTTLS 214-Copyright (c) 1995-2001, Stalker Software, Inc. 214-To report problems, send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 214- 214 End Of Help VRFY [EMAIL PROTECTED] 252 [EMAIL PROTECTED] is an address with a correct syntax Well, so far it appears to be valid... let's take it one step farther: mail from:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 250 [EMAIL PROTECTED] sender accepted rcpt to:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 250 [EMAIL PROTECTED] will relay to a client address quit 221 linkserve.com CommuniGate Pro SMTP closing connection It appears that linkserve.com will indeed relay mail to that address. The larger message here though is that you can telnet to a mail server using port 25, and see if it'll honor the VRFY command (some don't). After that, depending on the answer you get, you may wish to use a valid (though not necessarily correct) "mail from:" command to send a "rcpt to:" command to further verify the address. No mail will be sent, and the only record of the aborted "e-mail" will be deep within the dark and arcane logfiles of the the smtp server. Even if by some one-in-a-billion chance, the server is set up to make a spamlist from anyone who connects, you've used an address which will drop into a dark hole anyway. -- Steve Ackman http://twoloonscoffee.com (Need green beans?) http://twovoyagers.com (glass, linux & other stuff)
