I am trying to figure out a way to check if an email address exists without sending out an email. Anyone did something like this before in ColdFusion?
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Recently at work we had a debate about what could be the best way to validate an email address for a user, for handling cases where a user registers with a wrong email (say my email is andrew123#gmail.com and i put in aandrew123#gmail.com). We came up with this solution:
User register an email
An email for the registration is sent through AWS SES. If the mail goes in permanent bounce we set this user mail as "invalid"
When in cart checkout, if the user mail address is invalid an alert is shown, prompting the user to check and change the email address
However i still think that a better (and simpler) approach would be to just include and activation code in the registration email. I want to know your thoughts on this, since is really scratching my head :/
I have a use case for an email flow that looks something like this:
1) User sends an email to a specified address
2) Service receives the email and pings a webhook with the email in json format
3) My webhook/backend runs a quick check on the sender's email address and either:
4a) Creates an email and sends it as a reply to the original user, or
4b) Forwards the original email to another destination (it's important that the forward email retains the original senders address/reply-to etc.
Ok, I can easily get as far as 4a) using one of a few services (PostmarkApp, Mailgun, etc), but I'm struggling with 4b) - forwarding using an API.
The closest I can get is to receive the email into my Mailgun account and set a route that both stores it, and pings a webhook URL.
It then seems like I should be able to instruct Mailgun to forward the stored email to the final destination - but I just can't figure it out.
Anyone been here before?
I'm asking here before trying Mailgun support.
Thanks.
I am building an app that incorporates Postmark App's Incoming Email capability to keep a threaded list of replies to an email. Their documentation suggests adding the post ID to the reply-to address - for example reply+POSTID#domain.com. However, when I attempt to use this method with cPanel, the emails are bounced back.
I have reply#domain.com set up, without adding the post ID the email is forwarded to the Postmark App inbox address, adding the ID breaks it. Is there any way to do this in a WHM/cPanel environment? It is a VPS account so I have full access if there is another way to tackle this.
Are the messages bounced back from Postmark or is it a cpanel error? I can probably help you out there! Do you have an MX record setup for Inbound via http://developer.postmarkapp.com/developer-inbound-mx.html ? Once you have that going Postmark will accept messages from any address on that domain and parse off the addresses with + chars in them. Are we sure cpanel can handle email addresses with special characters?
My problem isn't validating an email address. I want to verify that an email address exists or not.
I have been looking solutions for that all day. But no result is useful to me.
Can any one help me with this? Thanks!
Ge.
This is not so trivial, but there are a number of options:
1) Find out, using DNS lookups, which mail servers are responsible for the domain of the E-Mail address and connect to one of them. Using SMTP try to deliver a message to the target address. Some servers will tell you at that point that the target address does not exist.
2) Send a test mail to the target address and check if you get a bounce/error mail back.
Not trivial, as badcat already said. If you absolutely have to, I would some other entity do the actual work of sending and receiving the email (such as your webserver). The flow would be something like
1) your app instructs your webserver to send a testing email (make sure you secure this - else it will be perfect for spamming)
2) your app instructs the user that a test email has been sent and that he should reply to it, confirming he's a human (or maybe click on a url contained in the email)
3) the users response (click on url or email reply) will be recorded in a small DB which you can query with your app
i want to check to see if a given email say for example (yourname#your_domain.com) most likely that exact email don't exist is there a way to ping the email address or anything along that along that idea?
You can't reliably verify email addresses without human intervention. That's why the most common method is to send the user a 'confirmation' email.
You can use my gem: "email_verifier" that you can find here: https://github.com/kamilc/email_verifier
It gives you validator which connects with given mail server "asking" smtp server if there is given email address.
You can check if the address format is valid, but there is no effective, email-specific "Ping" or lookup that you can do, other then sending a verification e-mail containing a code or link which the users clicks on or enters on your site to verify their address.