Hi guys,

Im using the ASPEMail (Persits.MailSender) to send emails to users who are registered on my site (http://www.skwagi.com).

The problem im having is that some users enter wrong email addresses..and when they register, the email they are supposed to get with their username and password bounces back.

Is there anything i can do..whether it is using ASPEmail or any other ASP component or using any other language for that matter which could check to see if the email address works, and if not then it would return an error message so the user knows its wrong before its stored in my DB??

thanks in advance !!

hmm... the best you could probably do is use REGEX to test and see if the email address is formatted correctly. There are alot of examples of this out on google.

Otherwise, you pretty much need to connect to the mail server and send a HELO and check the response. Not really hard to do. Here's an example, but it's in .NET. Not sure how easy to accomplish this will be with ASP.

http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/Valid_Email_Addresses.asp

Hi josh,

thanks for the quick reply. Yeah i already use regEx to do that..but obviously you can still enter stuff like aaa@aaa.com...

Is there no way of doing this response thing with asp as im not using .net

I'm by no means saying that theres not, but because of the types of classes and protocols used you're probably going to have to get a (or a few) third party component(s) (dlls) to get the job done. I haven't seen anybody do this in classic ASP. ASP.NET is utilized because of the namespaces/classes already used by the framework.

*shrugs* not sure where to go from here though. Just have to google it.

Rather than going to all the work to keep the email addresses out of your database, why don't you just use a list server program that will drop bad emails off the bat? We support mailman lists on our network, and I've always been fond of it's ability to drop badly formatted emails as well as get rid of those that bounce.

ooohhh that's a good option... most of the time.

Jamie,
Do you have some code you could post about how to do that? I was searching this forum and there doesn't seem to be a good answer to this guys question yet.

You could, for isntance, have a form that takes their email address and subscribes for them. usually subscribing to these lists is as easy as sending them an email with the subject SUBSCRIBE. Then they're subscribed.

This would be an option other than redirecting them to do it themselves.

Our website doesn't advertise this (yet) however we support individual MailMan lists at the following rates:

List Server Plan I: 5,000 emails per month / $5 per month
List Server Plan II: 15,000 emails per month / $10 per month
List Server Plan III: 30,000 emails per month / $25 per month

This structure is 'per list' so you can only have one list, however if you only need one it is a very good solution. To setup your website to subscribe someone to your list, you'd simply code it to submit a subscription email to the mailman server. The server will recieve the subscription request and send a confirmation email to the subscriber. Once that message is replied to, the user is added. Alternatively you can manually add subscribers in the Mailman administration page without them having to send in a subscription email or confirm in any way (useful for setting up your 'starter' list).

Either way, Mailman will not accept an incorrectly formatted address, and you can configure it's bounce options to remove addresses that are undeliverable.

Full documentation on the mailman software can be found at http://www.list.org

Or if you have any other questions you can just post them here, as always!