The Hindu : E-mail address verification tools

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 09, 2002

Business

Business

E-mail address verification tools

THIS WEEK NetSpeak examines a few tools/services that help check the validity of an e-mail address.

It is quite probable that regular e-mail users have encountered the problem of bounced mails that generally occur due to invalid e-mail addresses. This can happen because of various reasons:

Your friend might have changed his address but failed to communicate the change; somebody might have given you a wrong address by mistake or you might have collected e-mail addresses through a web-based registration process where a few of the respondents have deliberately typed in false addresses as they do not want to receive any mails from you.

Due to any of these reasons, your mailbox may get flooded with returned mails. This may not present any serious crisis moments for individuals who handle only a limited number of mails daily.

But, for companies that need to send mails quite often to all the members of their mailing lists, which contain tens of hundreds of addresses, the occurrence of several invalid e-mail addresses in the list is certainly not an acceptable proposition. More invalid addresses mean more bounced mails, resulting in unnecessary drain on the firm's valuable bandwidth and waste of personnel time in cleaning up the mailbox.

One solution to minimise this invalid/fraudulent e-mail address menace is to ascertain the validity of the e-mail addresses prior to sending mails to them using an e-mail verifier tool or service.

E-mail verifier

An e-mail address becomes invalid due to some syntax error or it can be due to lack of a proper domain. E-mail address verifiers generally check all these aspects before presenting their results to the user. Once the syntax is checked, the verifier attempts to pull out the e-mail related domain information from the domain name database.

If the verifier finds that the address has a proper domain, it will try to send a mail to the user referred in the address to verify the recipient.

G-lock's shareware software `Advanced E-mail Verifier' (http://www.glocksoft.com) is a good example of a tool for e-mail address verification. The program can be used to verify the validity of both individual e-mail addresses and addresses stored in a mailing list.

For example, if you want to verify the validity of a client's e-mail address, type in the address into the box labelled `email address', click the `Add' button — this operation will move the typed address to the `e-mail address list' window. Now, to validate this address, access the option `Check the selected item' available under the `Start' menu. After a while the software will tell you whether the e-mail address entered is OK or not.

If you have a mailing list file, the utility can be used to validate all the addresses in the list in a single shot. To do this open the mailing list file using the `Load Option' available at the `File' menu.

Another software worth trying is the MailVerify software whose trial version can be downloaded from: http://www.nehuenmultimedia. com.ar/.

If you are reluctant to download/install a mail address verifier and would like to validate an e-mail address on-line, check out the web-based `Validate Email'service (http://www.hexillion.com/samples/ValidateEmail.asp) of Hexillion.

The service presents various validation level options that can be used to alter the nature of the service's address verification process.

If you want to check only the syntax of the e-mail address, select the option `Syntax' from the box labelled `validation level.' Similarly, select the option `DNS' if you want to confirm the existence of e-mail address domain and to make sure the existence of a mail server at this domain, select the option `SMTP'. For more details on the various options, check out: http://www.hexillion.com/docs/ guides/HexValidEmail/concepts/.

Apart from the e-mail validation service mentioned above, the service hosts many interesting on-line services (http://www.hexillion.com/samples/). For example, the `Browser Mirror' service can be used to get the details that your browser reveals to the world.

For another on-line e-mail address verification service, check out: http://dotnet.dart.com/samples/everify.asp. This service allows you to read the verification script also.

SOT Office 2002

We have seen through this column the free word processing packages similar to MS-Word like AbiWord (http://www.abiword.com/) and MS-Office compatible packages like Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org) and EasyOffice (http://www.e-press.com/) and StarOffice (http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/6.0/index.html).

For those looking for free alternatives to MS-Office, the full-fledged Office suite, SOT Office 2002 (http://www.sot.com/en/linux/soto/), is a product worth experimenting. SOT Office, which is based on OpenOffice, has all the components available in the MS-Office package.

Like its MS-Office counterpart, SOT suite has such components as Word processor, SpreadSheet, Presentation and Drawing. The SOT suite is capable of accepting documents created with other programs like MS-Office, OpenOffice and StarOffice. Apart from local files, SOT office allows the user to directly load files stored on remote web servers also.

A notable highlight of this Office suite is the availability of some features that facilitate the creation of web pages. For example, any document edited through the SOT's word processor can be saved as a web page.

Another easy way to create a web page is with the help of the program's AutoPilot tool, which allows you to create different types of web pages.

When you access the AutoPilot (available under the `File' menu.) wizard and select the `Web Page' option from its menu, the program will present you with a window that contains several web page templates and layouts.

A template defines the web page's structure whereas a layout determines a web page's features such as background, fonts, colour and the like. For example, if you want to create a bilingual web page, select the template option `Bilingual', select an appropriate layout and press the `Create' button.

J. Murali

Email the author at:

murali27@satyam.net.in

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