way to check an email without sending it??

[Jon Radel]

Gary Kline wrote:
> 
> 	Hey Guys,
             ^^^^  Seen as a sexist assumption by some, but some 
consider gals to be guys.
> 
> 	Is there a way I can tell that an email address, say
> 
> 	joe at foo.com 
> 
> 	is still valid without joe knowing that I am curious?  --And,
> 	yes, this isn't a FBSD-specific question... .

Depends heavily on how foo.com does things.  Used to be, and still is 
some places, easy to tell by doing a raw SMTP connection and seeing what 
the receiving server did when you provided the destination address. 
That makes it real easy to harvest addresses by brute force, so these 
days many servers don't give you a hint unless you actually send some 
mail.  Some don't even give you a hint then, simply black holing the 
mail if the address is incorrect.

-- 

--Jon Radel
jon at radel.com
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