Apparently _some_ of this is possible. A couple of weeks ago, I was facing a similar situation, and found a site on the web that would do validation of email addresses by (IIRC) sending a mailto header to the mail domain and looking at the response. It did not work for all domains, notably hotmail and yahoo would not tell whether the address was OK or not. But a few smaller isps would work. Unfortunately, I cannot find that site now.
But this morning, I found something that might be better if you can translate asp -> python. http://coveryourasp.com/ValidateEmail.asp
Jim, Yes, this is real close to what I need to do in Zope. Thanks. I use Formulator for the email syntax validation from a form. But emails are universal, it would be nice to have built-in validation. My python is very weak but, It would be interesting to see something like this in Zope...from http://www.hexillion.com/software/components/HexValidEmail/ To see how easy it is to check syntax, domain, and username, take a look at these two lines of VBScript code: Set oVE = Server.CreateObject("HexValidEmail.Connection") If 0 = oVE.Validate("test@example.com",3) Then 'it's bad -Trevor