[Zope-dev] What to do when one mail recipient fails out of several?

[Jim Washington]

Matt Hamilton wrote:

> On Thu, 15 Nov 2001, Trevor Toenjes wrote:
> 
> 
>>Next week I get a new list of 500 emails that has never been tested. I would
>>like to do an SMTP handshake(without sending) to verify the
>>domains/addresses that will accept the emails, and remove the addresses that
>>fail.  This makes bounce management much cleaner and lowers overhead when
>>you actually send the messages.
>>
> 
> This is not actually possible with SMTP.  Various MTAs do have the
> functionality to let you know if they can route to that domain, but that
> still does not guarentee that the username will be accepted, or that the
> MX host for that domain is actually accepting mail.
> 
> -Matt
> 
> 

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

YMMV.

-- Jim Washington