Re: way to check an email without sending it??
Gary Kline wrote: write and say HI, Howzit hanging... or whatever. Anyway, the sendmail -bv ploy indicates that this person is still at the address i have. no big deal; i was just wondering. Uh -- sendmail -bv doesn't do what you think it does. It only shows you what your local sendmail would do with the message as it tries to deliver it. If it's not for a local user, then all it says is 'send it to the SMTP server responsible' and nothing at all about what the other machine would do with it. The only way to find that out is by connecting to the remote sendmail, either by telnet or by actually sending an e-mail. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard Flat 3 PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate Kent, CT11 9PW signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: way to check an email without sending it??
On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 07:13:30AM +0100, Matthew Seaman wrote: Gary Kline wrote: write and say HI, Howzit hanging... or whatever. Anyway, the sendmail -bv ploy indicates that this person is still at the address i have. no big deal; i was just wondering. Uh -- sendmail -bv doesn't do what you think it does. It only shows you what your local sendmail would do with the message as it tries to deliver it. If it's not for a local user, then all it says is 'send it to the SMTP server responsible' and nothing at all about what the other machine would do with it. The only way to find that out is by connecting to the remote sendmail, either by telnet or by actually sending an e-mail. Cheers, Matthew Yes, indeed. The only other thing is to mess with the whitepages, but not now. The future is coming too quickly, and I'm pretty sure that we'll all have some sort of ID tags embedded ... _somewhere_. thanks for the clue, gary -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard Flat 3 PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate Kent, CT11 9PW -- Gary Kline kl...@thought.org http://www.thought.org Public Service Unix http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org The 5.67a release of Jottings: http://jottings.thought.org/index.php ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: way to check an email without sending it??
Gary Kline wrote: Hey Guys, Seen as a sexist assumption by some, but some consider gals to be guys. Is there a way I can tell that an email address, say j...@foo.com is still valid without joe knowing that I am curious? --And, yes, this isn't a FBSD-specific question... . Depends heavily on how foo.com does things. Used to be, and still is some places, easy to tell by doing a raw SMTP connection and seeing what the receiving server did when you provided the destination address. That makes it real easy to harvest addresses by brute force, so these days many servers don't give you a hint unless you actually send some mail. Some don't even give you a hint then, simply black holing the mail if the address is incorrect. -- --Jon Radel j...@radel.com smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: way to check an email without sending it??
In response to Gary Kline kl...@thought.org: Hey Guys, Is there a way I can tell that an email address, say j...@foo.com is still valid without joe knowing that I am curious? --And, yes, this isn't a FBSD-specific question... . thanks for any insights, Sure. Telnet to the service and start a SMTP transaction, but then abort it: $ telnet mail.potentialtech.com 25 Trying 66.167.251.6... Connected to mail.potentialtech.com. Escape character is '^]'. 220 mail.potentialtech.com ESMTP If you spam me I will bounce you helo mail.potentialtech.com 250 mail.potentialtech.com mail from: wmo...@potentialtech.com 250 2.1.0 Ok rcpt to: j...@potentialtech.com 450 5.7.0 j...@potentialtech.com: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table quit 221 2.0.0 Bye Connection closed by foreign host. If you don't get a rejection after the rcpt to: line, then you know the server will accept the mail and you can close the connection without completing the transaction. Note, that this is no guarantee. Some spam catching nonsense may accept the mail right up to end, then throw it away without delivering it. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: way to check an email without sending it??
I use sendmail, so.. the command: sendmail -bv some...@domain.com tells me where the email should go before sendmail sends the email. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: way to check an email without sending it??
On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 01:59:24PM -0400, Bill Moran wrote: In response to Gary Kline kl...@thought.org: Hey Guys, Is there a way I can tell that an email address, say j...@foo.com is still valid without joe knowing that I am curious? --And, yes, this isn't a FBSD-specific question... . thanks for any insights, Sure. Telnet to the service and start a SMTP transaction, but then abort it: $ telnet mail.potentialtech.com 25 Trying 66.167.251.6... Connected to mail.potentialtech.com. Escape character is '^]'. 220 mail.potentialtech.com ESMTP If you spam me I will bounce you helo mail.potentialtech.com 250 mail.potentialtech.com mail from: wmo...@potentialtech.com 250 2.1.0 Ok rcpt to: j...@potentialtech.com 450 5.7.0 j...@potentialtech.com: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table quit 221 2.0.0 Bye Connection closed by foreign host. If you don't get a rejection after the rcpt to: line, then you know the server will accept the mail and you can close the connection without completing the transaction. Note, that this is no guarantee. Some spam catching nonsense may accept the mail right up to end, then throw it away without delivering it. telnet couldn't connect for unknown reason but thabks for the tip. I usually just write and say HI, Howzit hanging... or whatever. Anyway, the sendmail -bv ploy indicates that this person is still at the address i have. no big deal; i was just wondering. thanks, people, gary -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/ -- Gary Kline kl...@thought.org http://www.thought.org Public Service Unix http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org The 5.67a release of Jottings: http://jottings.thought.org/index.php ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: way to check an email without sending it??
Gary Kline kl...@thought.org wrote: telnet couldn't connect for unknown reason but thabks for the tip. I usually just The mail server for a domain doesn't have to run on that domain. That's what MX records in DNS are good for. For example, day, the address is ca...@example.org. Then use this command to find the mail servers for that domain: $ host -t mx example.org Every mail server has a priority number. The lowest number indicates the highest priority, i.e. the server that should normally be tried first. You should be able to telnet to that server on the SMTP port. If the MX list is empty, then either there is no mail mail server for this domain at all, or the domain is it's own mail server, i.e. you can telnet directly to example.org on the SMTP port (provided that it has at least an A record with a normal IP address). By the way, in the good old days (i.e. before spam) you could verify mail addresses with the SMTP VRFY command. But unfortunately, the days of spam have changed many things. :-( Most mail servers don't support VRFY anymore in order to protect against the spammers' address harvesters. Whatever you do to verify the address, it will not be completely without a trace. As soon as you connect to the SMTP port, it might cause an entry in that server's logfile, even before entering any SMTP command. Best regards Oliver -- Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing b. M. Handelsregister: Registergericht Muenchen, HRA 74606, Geschäftsfuehrung: secnetix Verwaltungsgesellsch. mbH, Handelsregister: Registergericht Mün- chen, HRB 125758, Geschäftsführer: Maik Bachmann, Olaf Erb, Ralf Gebhart FreeBSD-Dienstleistungen, -Produkte und mehr: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd Whatever happened to the days when hacking started at the cerebral cortex, and not at the keyboard? -- Sid on userfriendly.org by Illiad, 2007-06-20 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: way to check an email without sending it??
On Mon, 5 Oct 2009 13:59:24 -0400, Bill Moran wmo...@potentialtech.com said: B Telnet to the service and start a SMTP transaction, but then abort it. B If you don't get a rejection after the rcpt to: line, then you know B the server will accept the mail and you can close the connection without B completing the transaction. B Note, that this is no guarantee. Some spam catching nonsense may accept B the mail right up to end, then throw it away without delivering it. qmail will accept any valid address on the host, because the message might be forwarded or handled by a program. Rcpt to: always returns ok unless the address itself is mangled. The VRFY command is always answered like this to keep people from harvesting addresses: vrfy santacla...@example.com 252 send some mail, i'll try my best -- Karl Vogel I don't speak for the USAF or my company Sam: What's going on, Normie? Norm: My birthday, Sammy. Give me a beer, stick a candle in it, and I'll blow out my liver.--Cheers ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
