valid email address

[wookette]

how do i know if an email address is valid? if it isn't will it always bounce back?

[Buenchico]

When your e-mail provider's server sends mail to another server, the receiving server sends an acknowledgement back, to confirm receipt. If no acknowledgement is received, your server keeps sending the mail, until it eventually gives up. At this point, your e-mail provider's server sends you a bounced mail message. (That's actually slightly simplified. In reality, there are usually several servers along the route. It's the last sending server which would bounce the mail if the intended recipient server failed to acknowledge it).

So, in theory, you should always get a 'bounced mail' message if your mail can't reach the server at the end of the chain. (In practice, there can occasionally be problems with the 'bounce' message finding its way back to you).

However, the fact that an e-mail can arrive at an Inbox might mean that the address is 'valid' but that's not the same as saying that the account is 'active'. For example, if I give out an e-mail address on the AnswerBank, it's usually one I've set up just for that one person to contact me. Once our correspondence is at an end, the address will remain valid (in that any mail sent to it will arrive at my Inbox on the host server, and not be bounced) but I delete the account from my PC and never connect to it again. So there are at least one hundred old e-mail addresses (which I've used in the past) which are still 'valid' but they're certainly not 'active' because I never access them. (The mail just sits on the server forever).

You can attempt to see if your mail has got through by clicking on 'Tools' and selecting 'Request Read Receipt', when composing mail in Outlook Express. However, it's up to the recipient to decide whether to allow his PC to send you a receipt.

Chris

[rojash]

Because of the problems of spam with spoofed return addresses, many e-mail servers nowadays do not bounce e-mails with invalid addresses, but simply discard them. All of the systems I manage are configured in this way, so if you were to send an e-mail to an invalid address on any of my domains, you would not get a bounce, and so would have no way of knowing that the address did not exist.

[Hugh Spencer]

I have installed a system which tells me when an e-mail arrives and is opened which I find cuts out any doubts whether it has arrived or not. Try www.messagetag.com