Email user verification

zyberkid

Hi,

I'm working in a windows platform. Any body knows how to check if the email user exists using PHP?

Thanks in advance...

Poolie

Exists from/in where ? a database im presuming ?

zyberkid

I want to check if the user exists with a particular domain.
for eg: in a contact form a user has entered his email id as " example@example.com "
When he submit the form, immediately the script should check if a user 'zyberkid' exists with 'gmail.com' . I managed to verify the domain part using 'nslookup' and now the user part is remaining.

Thanks

bradgrafelman

I think the easiest way to validate it would be to send a test e-mail. Leave their account "inactive" until they click on an activation URL you randomly generate and send in the test e-mail. Once they click that link, their e-mail is verified and the account becomes active.

zyberkid

Validating a user by sending a test e-mail with link etc is a time taking process:bemused: . But my task is to verify the user name as soon as he hit submit button (just like in gmail)

Can you suggest any other solutions?

bradgrafelman

zyberkid wrote:
(just like in gmail)

Well, that's because the Gmail registration application has access to the Gmail user database, so it's rather easy to check if the account exists already or not.

What you're talking about is somehow determining if a user account exists on a remote mail system, right? Well, there's really no good way to do that without validation e-mails.

NogDog

There are some ways that you can potentially validate an that a mail server recognizes and email address, but my understanding is that they are not by any means perfect. Some mail servers may "play along" and return the appropriate responses, but others will not, so you will likely end up with many false negatives.

The only way I know of that is at all reliable is the email confirmation method suggested above (which is why virtually all site sign-up systems use it if they want to validate that the supplied email address is valid).