Help Objects: cheking a valid email

[Ham]

Hi,
Does anyone know of an object which gives the best solution to get the mx records of an email using nslookup if I want to see an email entry is valid? I have tried by making a test.bat file and get the output but I do not know if it is the best way.
An idea?

Thanks in advance.

[Dynasoft]

Are you wanting to see if an email address is valid, or just if the domain is valid / is set up to receive email?

[Ham]

Hi Dynasoft,

Thanks for the reply. I want to see if the domain is valid in other words I want to see if the email is registered to the domain and it will receive my replay.

[Dynasoft]

nslookup and similar things can tell you if a domain is set up for email, but nothing can tell you if the email address itself exists short of actually trying to send email to it.

[Ham]

Hi Dynasoft,

In this link it is mentioned that they can varifye if the mailbox exists.
in what other whay it is possible to do it if not by nslookup? is it possible to do it with the objects available to MMF?
Thanks

[Dynasoft]

Looking at the output they give, they are actually attempting to send an email to the address you give (and abort early, so that the email isn't actually sent).

EDIT: Note that this is not necessarily reliable, various server settings can cause a mail server to either accept and then blackhole an email to a invalid address (for privacy) or reject a mail to a valid address (not trusting the source of the attempt at sending the email, for example).

[Ham]

Hi Dynasoft,

I know that it is possible to use telnet to verify the method you describe. But the problem still exist that is if it is possible to do it by MMF object rather than finding the e-mail server by the output of the test.bat file which I described at first.

Thanks

[Dynasoft]

I don't know of any object which could do the equivalent of nslookup. Once you have the address of the mail server though, you could use moosock etc. to run the same commands that website does. EDIT: The problem of various anti-spam techniques blocking you isn't avoided though. For example: Nolisting (in which fake mx records are used), Greylisting (in which a server can temporarily reject you for not being a recognised sender), Callback Verification (in which the server you're contacting contacts you back to check if you're a real mail server); all would block you trying to verify if email addresses exist by contacting the server yourself.

Or, you could just try to send an email to the address. On the whole, it's a lot easier.

[Ham]

Hi Dynasoft,

Thank you for that answer. I will have to read about all that you have mentioned.

With best Reards

[LordRichard2]

Hmm, well you could verify the mailbox, or send an email using yahoo, and if it comes back with mail was unsuccessfully sent or etc, then it could, but that could be a security problem for your email. Sending an email manually is probably out of the question, as it is "CHECKING" if an inbox exists, as the user of your game would type it in, and it could be a security risk if you include your inbox name in the program, or a spam risk or something. I'm sure you could probably have series of events that checks if the format is valid, or a way to check for certain popular accounts, like yahoo, aol, hotmail, live, gmail, and msn.