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Email marketing: A Beginner's Guide
The Email Marketing Beginner's Guide is a starting point for those who want to discover what email is all about. It is free to Econsultancy Bronze members (registered users) and higher.
Senior Account Executive at Eulogy!
20 May 2009 23:06pm
Does anybody know a very accurate way/piece of software to check whether an email address is valid. I have found software to see if the server is active but not for the user name too (e.g. first.last@test.co.uk)
Any ideas? Any software recommendations?
E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker
21 May 2009 22:25pm
hiya, Tom,
sadly the software you're looking for doesn't really exist. Reason being, if you could run a check like that, every spammer out there would brute force every domain in existence to find all of the valid email addresses & spam them.
The best you can do (presuming you're wanting to check which addresses on your list are dead) is to email them & monitor the hard bounces.
hope that helps.
dan
--
http://www.barker.dj
Unsure
23 May 2009 21:53pm
Hi Tom,
We've got a programme at Hup.com which might help (although I'm no techie myself, so I can't really say). It's free as long as you only want to do one check at a time, for up to 100 uses per day.
Think what Dan's saying might be right, though.
Tom
Principal Email Marketing Consultant at Emailcenter UK
26 May 2009 16:12pm
There is software out there that will allow you to ping an address but it will only work on B2B addresses and I would not like to say how accurate it is. Consumer ISPs and webmail providers at Hotmail will accept your ping request so all addresses will look valid.
Here is an example:
http://www.glocksoft.com/amlv/
Sean
Director at GPMD Ltd
04 June 2009 11:58am
Tom,
This is only possilbe if the mail server you are checking knows about mailboxes or user accounts - and this isn't always the case.
Alot of companies use relay services as the first line mail server. i.e. for running spam flitering, so there is no guarantee that these servers know anything about the accounts for the domain they accept mail for. They just accept all mail, run it through a spam filter and pass it on.
It is fairly simple to write a program or script that runs this type of check - however it will not be 100% accurate and there can't be relied apon.
Hope this helps,
Mark