email address verification

[Cameron Laird]

In article <99fo48$d9h$1 at solaria.cc.gatech.edu>,
Holland King  <insanc at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
>Cameron Laird <claird at starbase.neosoft.com> wrote:
>: I don't understand your description.  In general,
>
>ok, we run a server that holds a lot of accounts, once an account expires
>then we run a script that parses the .forward file found in the home 
>dir. the script then takes the addresses found and makes them into aliases
>so that hopefully the user will not lose any mail. we need to make sure
>that the aliases are real addresses so that at worst mail is not bounced 
>and at best it doesn't go to a mailing list (i know i am being an optimist)
It's a good question to ask--but one which
turns out to be quixotic.  Not only can one
make no guarantees by a "static" examination
of a purported e-mail address, my own exper-
ience is that there are few heuristics which
are worth implementing.  So much can and
does happen at the recipient end of an e-mail
transaction that it's nearly fruitless to
try to automate.
>
>: comp.mail.misc might be a more productive place to
>: ask these questions than c.l.p.
>
>ok thank you i will try there to, the reason i asked here is that i tried
>comp.linux.misc and they didn't help and i am writing it in python (i 
>think my orignal post mention that i had found the smtp library and i 
>was wondering if there was something similar that would work)
I understand.  It's a reasonable presumption.
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-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html