is there any way to check if an email is active without sending it an email? (meaning that it does not get returned)
if i have 20,000 emails in my email list, and i do decide to send all of them an email, how can automatically cross out the email address that got returned?
Sending an email and requesting the user click some sort of activation link is the best way to determine if the email address is valid, and being used by someone. If you just want to see if the email is valid whether or not its registerd or active, use a Regex.
As for crossing them out, where are the emails stored? If its in a database, just set an activation key and a flag saying whether the link has been visited or not.
No.
Depends on how you are sending them. (Please provide more details)
There used to be a way to query a mail server if an email address is valid. However, since spammers used that facility for ill purposes, almost no mail servers will support that method anymore.
All you can hope to do is a DNS lookup on the email domain to see if the domain is valid.
These days, you can't know if the email address is valid. The domain is about as far as you'll get and you can do a reverse lookup on that to see if that is valid. But it won't tell you about the user.
What you need is something to process the bounces from your mail out and write some sort of script to perhaps update the list. There are many tools under Linux for this type of purpose such as procmail. Theres a port of that for windows I think.
No
You need mailing list management software. Lyris Listmanager is a paid one that has automatic bounce handling and removes users from your list. There are several free ones that doe the same thing: ezmlm, mailman, majordomo and many others. You probably don't want to just send all those emails without a piece of MLM software to manage it. you will probalby get blacklisted fromservers. You need things like unsubscribe handling or you won't be sending emails for long.
Heh. if you could find out a way, the answer would be worth billions to spammers.
The best answer here is: No.
Related
I wrote PHP script that validates email with smtp check and mx record check.
its able to give weither email is valid or not but
i want to add functionality of explaining bounce rate of email.
I see similar platform like neverbounce doing this.
Do i need any kind of AW service? or any kind of special hosting to check bulk emails are spam/bounce or not.
Please Advice
Thanks.
Bounces are not about content, but about quality of subscriptions in yours list. Services like mailcheck.co, neverbounce etc will help to avoid non existing mails, hard bounces.
For validating email content and MTA settings you may try mail-tester.com
It will suggest to change email content if it looks suspicious, and will ask for proper mail transfer agent settings, like DKIM, SPF etc.
But in common - it's two different tasks. First one validates your email list, second one validates sender and email.
this was ask over and over and still no good solution!
When someone sends an email using php and placing another domain in "from" it will end up in spam.
Solutions normally are:
- Use your "from" and place the domain you want in the "reply-to";
- Have your domain whitelisted by main mail services.
The 1st its not really a solution and I was never able to make 2nd, because its impossible to reach hotmail.com, yahoo.com, etc..
I see lots of sites today having the option to email article to someone from the user email. How can I achieve this?
Thx,
Telmo Cardoso
When someone sends an email using php
and placing another domain in "from"
it will end up in spam.
This is not neccessarily true.
Check which mail servers identify your message as spam. Also check with your hosting company for their preferred method to send out mail.
Try to be straightforward with your message. Offer the users a short textarea (with your default masage), which they can change and customize. Also give the possibility to enter real name of the participants with their e-mail addresses.
Just be senible and your messas will go thru.
Send the email from your webserver and add a reply-to header like you have mentioned.
Make sure you have SPF setup for your server to help get yourself into the gMail, Live Mail and Yahoo accounts.
A nice and cheap alternative is to send your emails via Amazon SES to avoid having to warm your own IPs etc.
I would go with the Amazon SES (or a similar service) and leave the worrying about getting the server setup right to the experts. Make ensuring deliverability someone elses problem.
This article is a nice starting point:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-through-code.html
The problem is related to the header of the email. not neccessarily the 'from' address domain. Some spam filters (i.e. cox.net incoming spam filters) will perform a reverse lookup on the IP address that the email came from. If the domain name returned on the reverse lookup is not the domain name of the sending address. Then they will liekly mark it as spam.
I'm not sure if this is exactly possible, but figured I'd throw it out there.
I have a client that is getting some hate-mail from somebody he knows via a contact form on a website that I developed for him. Currently I do the normal checks for a validly-formatted email address, along with a Captcha, but the client has requested that a user enter his/her own email address in the form.
Now I realize that something like this could be easily spoofed by setting up a fake Yahoo account, etc, but the client's thinking is that this person is not quite that computer-literate.
Is there any possibility for checking if an email address is valid and in-use?
The only other things I can think of is turning his contact form into a mailto: link.
The only way to confirm an email address is in use is to send an email to it with a unique token, and have them pass the token back to you (usually by clicking a link). This is typically how mailing list signups work.
There are theoretical ways to tell in the SMTP protocol, but many (or maybe even most) servers don't respect those due to problems with spammers abusing them.
Although it may not work, I find Akismet ( http://akismet.com/ ) fairly good at blocking spam and unwanted emails in forms and comments.
If that fails and the problem is only one individual you can blacklist by IP, or even by browser fingerprint ( http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/EFF-demonstrates-a-browser-s-finger-print-918786.html ) Ultimately it is impossible to stop someone though if they are dedicated.
Why not just not send this email if message contains some commonly used abuse word or abusers IP address?
I have a site where users register for an account. I have an internal communication system, that sends them an email when they get a private message. I dont force people to confirm their email, so naturally, many enter a fake address.
When they get a PM, it tries to send them an email, but obviously fails, so it keeps retrying and retrying. After a few weeks, the retry queue gets quite big, and it affects server performance (I also dont wanna get blacklisted for all these attempts).
What can I do to solve this issue (other than force people to confirm their email upon registration).
If you don't want to force people to confirm their email because if something goes wrong, they can't access their login straight away, why not do something like this:
If they haven't confirmed their E-Mail, don't send PMs, but show them when they are logged in instead. Remind them to confirm their E-Mail.
If they have confirmed their E-mail, send them out.
But anyway, your scenario sounds like a server misconfiguration. Why would a mail server keep re-sending mails that it got a "not deliverable" message for? As far as I know, re-sending mails only occurs when the receiving host was not reachable for technical reasons.
You really should just require confirmation.
Short of that, you can deactivate users whose emails have bounced a certain number of times, and require a new email at next login.
It will be hard without verifying, but you can at least verify the domain it's coming from:
Option 1: Use getmxrr to search for MX records on their hostname
Option 2: Use checkndsrr to check their DNS info
But all these really do is check the validity of the domain, and whether it's running a mailserver. To get real authenication a confirmation is the best way. You could also implement a tool to send out a test email, and see if it bounces back. But this method may not always work as expected, because of variations, some servers it's instant, others it can be a day later to return an undeliverable email.
I hope this helps.
consider having a checkbox so that people can opt-out of email notifications. if they do not enter a valid email address, it is surely because they do not want to receive emails in the first place, so let them tell you.
additionally, you may consider having an opt-in system, where people will not receive email notifications in the first place and have to enable it somewhere in their account settings, providing an email address at this moment. this way, the number of fake email addresses will be reduced to near zero.
I need to build a little webapp but I'm not sure what is the best thing to do.
A person that subscribe the petition is signing an email sent to X. This will be also saved to a db in order to show online who subscribed.
The idea is to have a standard text message, the user submit his name and that name goes into the message as signature.
I could make php send the email with the address of the real sender, or let the user copy and paste the text and let him send the email on his own.
I'm not sure of what is the best way to implement it. What will be more "effective", I mean as number of subscribers the solution where the app send the email is easier, but what about the authenticity of the emails? They could be considered not valid if sent all from the same place?
Regardless of the whole thing being a "good" idea or not, you want to keep yourself safe. If you spoof the from field, chances are most of your email (especially for domains with SPF records) will not make it through the first level of spam filtering.
A SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record lists the only IPs that are allowed to send mails for a domain. If a domain has a SPF record and you poll it, you're supposed to treat anything that didn't originate from a listed server as hazardous waste.
Depending on where you're sending these emails, you'll probably end up with your mail server on one or multiple blacklists. That means any email, SPF or not just won't get accepted.
So in short:
Get people to send their own email. Provide templates.
Consider utilizing the full specs for <a href="mailto:... -- you can put the subject and body in the link, allowing templates to be a one-click affair.
You could use Javascript on your site to personalise the message (and therefore mailto: link) while still on your site.
Let me get this straight - so you want to add to the flood of armchair activism email that is already saturating the world to no good purpose, and you're asking how best to do it? I would read the following before going any further with this:
http://www.breakthechain.org/armchair.html