Re: Check if email address exists (not if email addrss is valid)

I've been on vacation so didn't see this one until now.  It is such a
unique question that I had to respond.

If such a product existed, it would be heavily used by spammers, and
therefore one should be glad there is no such thing.

To create one, one would need to be able to get into the email database
of every server in existence -- something the server owners would resist
with great vigor.  What you're looking for is virtually an
impossibility.

But in fact, there have been some applications written that have
attempted to do something like this.  They're called "worms" and
"viruses", and most of them propagate by insinuting themselves onto
vulnerable machines and sending copies of themselves to every email
address in a victim's address book.  If anyone of them had also tried to
send the email addresses to a central location for storage in a
database, then, by golly, THERE would be the thing you are looking for.

Heh.

-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of building .NET applications targeted for the Web
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul ten Brink
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2006 1:12 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [DOTNET-WEB] Check if email address exists (not if email addrss
is valid)

Hi,

Does anyone know if there is a serivce, a third-party component or some
example code to check if an email address exists?

I do not mean to check if an email addrss is valid, I know how to do
that using regular expressions. But even if an email address is
syntactically valid, it need not exist.

Googling gives an overflow of irrelevant hits about users that supplied
a
non-existing email address...     :-(

(Cross-posted on DotNet-WinForms)

Thanks in advance,
Paul ten Brink
[email protected]

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