email address validation (ping)

[bobvaz]

I have a form validation program on both the client side and server side which performs a syntactic check on the email address (and other fields on a form).  Through all my googling, I cannot find a way to actually check if the email address (after verifying it syntactically) is correct.  Can anyone tell me what is available for me to actually send the address to the site and check if it is 'real'?

Thanks in advance.

Bob

[jkewlo]

is it possible?

[premiso]

The best way to do this with php is the checkdnsrr

 

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/users-email-address-php/

 

Is a site about that.

[bobvaz]

Thanks....

Will give it a shot

 

[revraz]

That will only check to see if the domain exists, not the email itself.

 

Is this something a user will register for?  If so, use confirmation emails.

[premiso]

That will only check to see if the domain exists, not the email itself.

 

Is this something a user will register for?  If so, use confirmation emails.

 

Correct. If the ultimate goal is to see if the actual email account exists, unfortunately that is not possible without using an email account from the server for returned emails and parsing them etc then updating the database if it bounced. Or do the confirmation email, but as personal experience, especially aol hotmail and yahoo tend to filter emails from my server as spam if they are not added to the trusted list so the user never sees those emails. So the confirmation emails has to be overriden to verify the user in this case cause they may never see the email.

 

Hope that helps either way, at least it is one step closer to being a valid email address.