Unfortunately, VRFY usually doesn't work either -- it can be turned
off and often is. For instance, O'Reilly's sendmail book recommends
setting PrivacyOptions to goaway to disable VRFY and EXPN commands.
Sometimes VRFY returns a 250 or 252 when all it's actually checking is
that the name looks something like foo@bar:
VRFY asdf
550 asdf... User unknown
VRFY foo@bar
252 <foo@bar>
VRFY xyz@abc
252 <xyz@abc>
Our site sends email to people who register, and travel agents need to
reply to requests via email or phone, so it's important to us to have
clean emails. But it appears to be an intractable problem in general.
If someone knows of a way that mostly works, I'd love to hear
about it...
Rod McChesney, Korobra
Craig R. McClanahan wrote:
>
> Rod McChesney wrote:
>
> > Bear in mind that whois often returns false negatives, because it's a
> > huge security breach to allow random outsiders to skim your list of
> > email accounts. For instance, I believe most corporate email systems
> > refuse whois requests. You should probably try whois out on a sample
> > of your actual user base to see how many could have been validated
> > this way, and whether it's worth doing.
> >
> > Rod McChesney, Korobra
> >
>
> The better way to validate users's EMAIL addresses would be to use the verify
> (VRFY) command already present in the SMTP protocol used to transport Internet
> email. The protocol is pretty simple, and is outlined in RFC 821. It's probably
> a 50-liner to do the remote validation using sockets, given an email address as
> an argument.
>
> Craig McClanahan
>
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