SPUG: Checking Email Addresses

[Aaron Salo]

At 10:11 AM 10/6/00 -0700, Ice Demon wrote:
>while for this stuff to be checked. Your best bet would be to do what
Daniel said
>and have them enter their email twice rather than checking to see if it can
>actually reach them.

That's a good idea - another thing that works in conjunction with that is
to set up a specific mail alias on your server like 'notifications at foo.com'
specifically for the purpose of handling these sort of things, and always
send the outbound password-mail FROM: that user with proper RFC822 Reply-To
and Return-Path headers. 

Then set an entry in your sendmail alias.users file that will catch all
inbound mail to that specific address and pipe them to a script that will
[notify someone of the bounce|update the db that the address bounces|play a
little tune]. Then in that script you can grep the mail body for the bounce
reason and even do some intelligent rule-based forwarding depending on what
the bounce reason was more flexibly than procmail. Also, some people
reflexively reply to such messages, and if you don't grep a mail failure
header or other telltale string out of the response, you can figure it was
one of those folks and you can auto-reply to them and tell them to put down
the crack pipe and re-read the instructions. Or you can do the internic
'mail-from' thing where you force them to reply to your password message
before you light up their password, let the script take care of all that
stuff. Ain't life grand??

Or if you're a procmail fan just make a user called 'notifications' and go
that way with it.

Cheers
-----------------
'a good website is no defense
against a bad business plan'
-----------------
Aaron Salo
aaron at activox.com
------------------

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