There's a bunch of ways to accomplish what you request. Therefore, I'll offer what I would do. Other folks, more brilliant than, will provide better ideas.
1. Do you have access to the mail server? For instance, I run qmail on my SOHO system and, therefore, have full sys-admin rights. If you do, you can include a unique identifier in the return address. When the newly-signed user responds to the email, your mail server could send the email to the authentication program which would then update the database to reflect a valid user. 2. I would search for all users name Fred%: SELECT username FROM mytable WHERE username LIKE "Fred%" ORDER BY username; in your PHP program: $base = "Fred"; //you've set $base from the submitted form $query = "SELECT username FROM mytable WHERE username LIKE "$base%" ORDER BY username;" $result = mysql_query($query) or die(...); if( mysql_num_rows($result) == 0 ) { ... this is a unique name... } else { $i = 0; $validname = $base."1"; while( list($uname) = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) { if( ! strcmp($uname, $validname ) { $i++; $ validname = $base${i}; } } } Therefore, $validname holds the unused user name to suggest. -----Original Message----- From: Dave Carrera [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, March 25, 2002 8:15 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PHP-DB] 2 related ?'s email & users Hi All I hope you can shed some light on the logic behind these 2 issues. 1) How do I make an email verify type of thing? So user enter there email address as part of the sign up process and we send an email to that address. That bit I've got. But how do you check the reply to the address stored and then activate the account. It's a for online support manager im writing hence the importance of a verified email address. 2) Suggest a Username? I have seen some places that when you put in an onscreen name and click send it checks against the list of usernames already stored and if it matches it comes back an error saying that username already exists but how about this one, which is the name you chose plus a incremental number. So visitor puts in say "Fred" but Fred exists and so does Fred up to Fred19. How do I check this and offer Fred20 as a suggestion. I hope someone can help with this. As always I thank you in advance of any help, code samples or pointers. Dave Carrera Php Developer http://davecarrera.freelancers.net http://www.davecarrera.com -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php