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How to bulk verify email addresses ?
I have a user that wants to email 300 ish people once a month, these are double opt in, however I wanted to check the addresses are valid before they get sent, in the hope that we won't get blacklisted on that IP.
The question is, are there any web based bulk email verifying programs available that I could host.. I checked sourceforge/freecode but cannot see anything.
I can see Windows based apps that I could use at a push..
Anyone got any ideas or comments on the risks of this ?
Thanks
Comments
300 a month is not a lot, we've had users who wanted to email few thousand a day and simply refused on the spot.
You can ask your client to show you the website where users opt in?
Thats a good point, obvious now you point it out ! Thanks.
@YKM we used to have a script that runs on the HN of openvz. It basically checks the mail queue. I can't remember if it actually read the emails in the queue for "spam" words, or just checked the queue size. It alerted us, and most of the time we can stop the vps before the spam actually gets reported ...
you can use Amazon SES
@rsk name of that script?
Cant really remember it from the top of my head, but it was a pure bash script that run on cron, this was back even before solus was released. I will try to find it - we stopped using it as it overkilled our mailbox with false positives though.
My bad, I thought you were sending emails yourself.
I think I will have to pay to get something developed, thanks people.
http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/g/vrfy.htm
Perfect, thanks !
Testing with VRFY won't get you very far these days. Most mail servers have it off or just return 252. It's to prevent spammers from harvesting legitimate email addresses. http://www.spamresource.com/2007/01/whatever-happened-to-vrfy.html
I think the best you can do is try actual delivery and handle the bounces to clean up the list for future mailings.
@t3k9
Thanks, that vrfy command from @spencer does not just rely on the mail vrfy command, it does try and pass mail etc.. its pretty cool.. so far I use:
vrfy -van [email protected]
Use mandrillapp. You have 12k emails/month for free.
They have a blacklist other features you will like.
Receiving mail servers don't usually penalize for invalid addresses, unless it's clearly abusive -- for example a dictionary attack. There's tons of perfectly valid mail sent every day to invalid accounts (accounts that have been closed for whatever reason, and address misspellings).
What's important IMO is that you don't persist in attempting to send mail to an invalid account. A sensible mail list application will handle this for you by automatically unsubscribing an address that continues to bounce after X days or Y attempts.
@sleddog thanks, that makes sense, learning more all the time