Avoiding errors due to bad email addresses

[Nathan Sokalski]

I am making an application that will be used to send an email message to all
members in a certain group (such as maybe all exec board, or all IT, or all
secretaries, etc.). However, as we all know the may occasionally be a
misspelled email or, more often, someone's email is not working, or for
whatever reason an address returns the message. I want to avoid having this
error displayed, but I still need to know which addresses it did not get
sent to. How can I do this? The ideal solution would be a method that tests
whether an address is valid, but I don't know of one. Thanks.

 

[Michel van den Berg]

Dear Nathan Sokalski,

Please have a look at Regex (look it up in your docs) and take a look at
http://www.regexlib.com/ (or any other regex website).
Regex is short for 'regular expression' and is a way to test strings to be
in a specific format (eg an emailaddress or postalcode). If you regex
succeeds then your string is in a valid emailaddress format.

About the email address returning the message: there are some third-party
controls/websites that do this for you. For example:
http://www.glocksoft.com/amlv/index.htm However, I don't know how good these
are, but I do know that implementing it by yourself is a lot more work! If
you would like to do it by yourself then you should look into the SMTP.

Hope I helped you,

Michel van den Berg