Email verification software?
 

Hello:

Work related - I'm looking for an application that will automatically check the validity of email addresses from a
database we have at work. (This has nothing to do with spam, etc - my company does some CRM work and we want to be able to tell when an individual email is no longer available so we can update their status in our CRM DB.)

I'm less interested in the syntax based apps (e.g. does the address have a "@" and a "." and not interested in the domain level tools (checking if ibm.com is a valid domain) but rather
AM interested in tools which will effectively ping entire email addresses themselves and report back those which are dead.

This needs to be invisible to our clients (those with the email addresses) b/c we don't want to spam them and a version which could be scripted/scheduled for a UNIX environment is preferable to one which requires a person to shepherd the process manually (using a UI.)

Does what I am looking for even exist?
(PS - already checked out and passed on:
Fast Email Verifier Pro
Advanced Email Verify
Advanced Email Verifier
High Speed Verifier
DOTS for Email Validation)

Thanks in advance for any leads!
Apetaster

i just a did a simple search in google and come up with a bunch

Google Search

Check those out.

Thanks - yeah - I've been doing keyword searches much of they day and trying to interpret the good stuff (for my purposes from the "less than ideal") seen most of these (from the results) already. Hoping the stars lined up and someone else out there had a similar need and knew of a decent checker.

"ping" an e-mail address? I don't think there's much that'll do that, it seems IMO, to be putting too much of a load on your & the other's server.

Sounds like you want something like a person to person listserv, where only subscribed members can send to the list. You might want to check into those as an option.

What kind of mail server are you using? If it's sendmail, you might be able to write a macro to call a perl (or similar) script to check your database.

You can't "ping" an email address without sending a message to it. This is by design. Otherwise, it'd be super easy for spammers to maintain their databases.

Why not clean your email db whenever you send mail and it bounces, like most lists do?

I had to look into this at work as well, and came to the same conclusion, you've gotta look for bounces.

Thanks for the insight all. After all that, we ended up running a demo of "Fast Email Verifier Pro" not UNIX, but the best Win alternative we could find and it worked like a charm. No emails sent but found a lot of cases where the mailbox requested did not exist.