> People are entering bogus e-mail addresses in my subscription forms.
> Most of them are just words without the @, but more and more seem to be
> bogus addresses.
>
> Before I start writing ping routines and such, what is the quickest,
> simplest way of determining whether a host exists?
this is only a half-solution, but it's fairly easy to find out whether a
given /machine/ exists. perl has the built-in routine gethostbyname()
which will do a standard DNS lookup for you.
@A = gethostbyname('www.yawp.com');
print "name = $A[0]\n";
print "aliases = $A[1]\n";
print "type = $A[2]\n";
print "length = $A[3]\n";
print "address = ", join ('.', unpack ('C4', $A[4])), "\n";
assuming you get a legitimate network address, at least you know the
machine exists.
checking the address itself would be harder.. for that, you'd have to open
a socket connection to the mailserver, and ask it to verify the address.
that's certainly possible.. it's part of a standard SMTP transaction, in
fact.. but it's not trivial.
mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 'net geek..
been there, done that, have network, will travel.
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