1,115 point Participant
 whisky
Joined on 09-25-2003, 12:52 AM
Posts 320
 Hi,



I have an application where users send individual emails to candidates. Is it possible to check if the email the candidate gave exists or not?

The candidate provides his email address over the phone so it could happen that the person who took his address typed it in incorrectly. I need to therefore check that the email exists and if it doesn't raise an error message to the user informing him that no such email account exists.

Thanks for the help.

Short answer: no

More qualified answer: The only sure way of knowing an email address is bad is when you get a bounce from it. But that can take some time.

-Peter

When the user gets the email address over the phone and types it in you can validate it to ensure the email address is in the correct format using regular expressions, this would pick up some typos but of course it doesn't stop the problem entirely because as long as the email address is in the correct format, even if it doesn't exist, then it will pass validation. You could get around this to some degree by having the user input the email address into two separate fields and then comparing the values those fields hold to ensure they are identical, again it will help avoid typos.