How to check if an email ID is real without sending email

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Check if email is real

Introduction (Check if an email ID is real):

  We might encounter a situation many times wherein we would like to check if an email ID is real or fake. We would be interested to ascertain that without sending an email to that ID. It’s possible to do that programmatically and this blog will tell you how ?    

Overview:

  To check if an email exists or not, a fairly simple process is to be followed as below 1) Extract domain name and user from the email ID. For eg abc@xyz.com will equate to user: abc and domain xyz.com.   2) Extract MX records (mail exchanger records) corresponding to the domain using standard APIs of the programming language that you choose to use. In this blog, its PHP. But one can choose to use Python,Perl,Ruby or any other language of their choice. Mail exchanger records signify the domain responsible for accepting emails from senders.   3) Set a certain connection timeout while trying to connect to the domain through TCP socket.   4) Open a socket to the designated MX domain using socket APIs.   5) If connection is refused,  straight away it’s concluded that the domain isn’t accepting emails and thus the email ID is fake.   6) If connection is established , the next task is to verify if mailbox exists for the user specified by the email ID. For this, open socket connection to the SMTP server , first by sending MAIL FROM command followed by RCPT TO command. If the status code returned by RCPT TO command is either 250, 450,451 or 452, the mail exists and it’s real. If any other status code is returned, that means, mail doesn’t exist.   Below is a small TABLE indicating different status codes with their meanings  
Code Meaning
200                                 (nonstandard success response, see rfc876)
211                                 System status, or system help reply
214                                              Help message
220                                 <domain> Service ready
221                                 <domain> Service closing transmission channel
250                                 Requested mail action okay, completed
251                                 User not local; will forward to <forward-path>
252                                 Cannot VRFY user, but will accept message and attempt delivery
354                                  Start mail input; end with <CRLF>.<CRLF>
421                                  <domain> Service not available, closing transmission channel
450                                  Requested mail action not taken: mailbox unavailable
451                                  Requested action aborted: local error in processing
452                                  Requested action not taken: insufficient system storage
500                                  Syntax error, command unrecognised
501                                  Syntax error in parameters or arguments
502                                  Command not implemented
503                                  Bad sequence of commands
504                                  Command parameter not implemented
521                                  <domain> does not accept mail (see rfc1846)
530                                   Access denied (???a Sendmailism)
550                                   Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
551                                   User not local; please try <forward-path>
552                                   Requested mail action aborted: exceeded storage allocation
553                                   Requested action not taken: mailbox name not allowed
554                                   Transaction failed
  Demo below to see all this in action:-     Below is the end to end code to achieve the above :-   Client code (HTML)
  Server Side code (PHP)
  Verify email class PHP (Third party)
  The above is just a simple demo using PHP. But the same can be implemented using Python,Ruby or any other language of your choice.  

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An avid reader, responsible for generating creative content ideas for golibrary.co. His interests include algorithms and programming languages. Blogging is a hobby and passion.

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