h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is there any way of checking if an email address is correct without actually sending an email to it?

You know when people give you their address verbally and you don't write it down thinking you'll be able to remember it, only the following week you can't...quite...

If you know the doobry; I.E., if it is a 'hotmail', a 'yahoo' etc, most of them have 'directorys', where you can look them up; but will normally only work if the person concerned has agreed on having their adress in the directory

You could stick the e-mail address into a search engine and see if it comes up with anything... even if the person you're looking for doesn't have a website, it might find someone else, in which case you'd know it's the wrong address.

ok, am trying a websearch.

The address I need I can remember the first bit but not the bit after the @ (yeah slack I know).

Dear Slacker,

"The bit after" you could *PING* it.

Start > DOS prompt > ping yahoo.co.uk

If you ping yehaoo.co.uk you may get a different result, thn you know "tha-in't right."

Not a definitatve solution I know, but less guess work.

Kind regards,

[email protected]

Can't Ping I'm afraid, I'm on a mac.

kea, you can't ping on a mac, I shocked, maybe its just called something else?

Did have another idea... Pasword request.
Do a request for the name you think it is, if no such name then you know that's not it. But, that may be OK for well known web based accounts yahoo / lycos etc.

Plus if the person is daft enough to pick a reminder question that is a common one, like "favourite colour" and the site will display the password on screen, not just send it to a alterate e-mail address/SMS text then... You may get to be extra nosey.

Due to yahoo willing to display password reminders on-screen, I would not use yahoo for anything other than 'on-line' interactions, such as with others from this site. Any personal mail is bes kept away from such unsecure transorts.

You can't ping on OS9 apparently (not sure about OSX). I think you can downoad something that will let you ping but I can't remember what it is.

http://www.more.net/technical/pingtrace.html

Thanks Jab, that is an interesting page. They don't say what the third party programmes are though.

Hiya kea, yea, there are a few sites with complaint about ping problems. Think with a Mac I'd walk into a Mac Centre and ask for something to do the job. That is if no download site, tucows or the like has anything.

Going back to your question about how to see if an e-mail address is active. One thing yahoo spam protection offers is 'block HTML graphics' possibly looking at a graphic can be traced in a 'spyware' way. Sounds far to complicated.

I'm sticking with the "don't tell me your address over the phone, text to my mobile or this is my e-mail address and I'll reply _to you_ plan."

Good suggestion! I could also try that old fashioned thing of writing it down somewhere reliable at the time

It is supposed to be possible to code a virus-type program into an image file to be read/run by the destination computer reading it. That would seem to rely on extraordinarily stupid programming on the part of the browser/imager but one can't really put that beyond the incompetence of M$. I've never done it myself though to know. Meanwhile javascript in HTML can obviously be dangerous. For a start, an image in HTML can be made active such that hovering over it loads something else (lots of this on BBC/dna too). That could alert the server at the other end that someone was viewing.

Well SEF, if you can code animated .gif's you can code moving of data I suppose.

To verify an e-maill address, maybe a request of a sites webweaver@ 'website.com' would work? Or send it to noreply@ 'notquitesure.com' ?

send an email to it! Ok, you got an email addy from a friend and now you can't quite remember it, so remember the parts of an email addy:

@.

Your pal's name may be nice and easy: firstname.lastname or maybe firstname_lastname. Or tricky; some companies will give you an email addy based on your login so John Doe gets something like jdoe but because Jane Doe has just started this week, she gets jadoe, or jndoe or even jedoe.

The host is usually the company name, or if it is your friend's own (non-work) addy then look up the free email companies to see if any ring a bell. Yahoo, hotmail etc.

The domain: if it's a British compony, then .co.uk is probably the domain. For the free email addys it's usually .com Though more and more are becoming 'regional' and will give you a reginally appropriate address like .au for Australia or .fr for France.

Finding email addys is not a straightforward task, as the rise of spam has made everyone aware of how easily their mailboxes can be filled with unwanted junk. Do your best to come up with say, your five best guesses and send off an email to each querying if it belongs to your friend.

You can cut this list down down to check if the host.domain bit is right (or rather exists at all) by querying the whois database (www.whois.net). The whois database holds every registered domain and will show if a domain is owned and who owns it. It will also contain contact details of who registered the domain. The search on the whois.com page you want is 'search by domain or keyword'. So for instance, you would enter h2g2.com and not www.h2g2.com.

Good luck!

Thanks Maolmuire. Unfortunately my question was how to check an email address _without_ having to send it

Also in NZ alot of people's host name is their ISP and there are lots of different ones, so unless it is one of the main ones or one I am familiar with I am unlikely to remember it (I can't tell you the host name of my parents' email address of the top of my head).

Thanks for the whois link though that looks very useful.

Mostly I was hoping there was some kind of ping test for emails, but I gather there isn't.


kea.

I have just attempted to ping my own email address and it said Unknow host. so can you ping emails?