Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of bleggee
bleggeeFlag for United States of America

asked on

Testing a list of Emails for validity

Hi All -
I have a list of about 330 Email Addresses from customers of ours over the last 10 years.
I suspect that about 1/2 of those email addresses are no longer valid.
Is there a PHP Script or Utility or some way that I can load in 330 emails and have them checked/pinged as valid *before* I try to email to them?  
I don't want to generate 150-some-odd email bounces ... if for no other reason, the 3rd party email services will be blocking my account!!

(The emails are in a CSV file right now, 1 per line, nicely separated. It doesn't matter to me what platform, Windows, Mac, Linux Web Server)

Thanks in advance
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Nicholas
Nicholas

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of Mal Osborne
Probably going to be difficult.

 SMTP includes a VRFY command which is used to verify an email address is correct, however most mail servers are configured to lie to you when this command is issued, either saying any email address exists, or none do. Even if you succeed in sending a message, there is no guarantee that the address is correct, it may just be silently deleted. Basically , in 2017 people are a bit coy about their email addresses.

It is unlikely that sending to invalid addresses will raise problems with spam filters, I have send burst of thousands in the past, with hundreds of bounces. The bounces do not cause problems, however if too many users perceive your email as spam and that feedback is somehow collected, it can be problematic. AOL accounts can be bad for this.

I would suggest using a 3rd party mailer, and probably best to send out on an IP that differs from that of your main mail system. I have use mailthempro in the past, it seems to work well.

http://www.kadmy.com/mpro.html
SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
The way that I handle this is to use a dedicated POP3 account to handle the bounces, however the sending email can be whatever email address you like.

The tool I use and recommend for such sends is SendBlaster.

As mentioned by others above, bounces need not concern you.  SendBlaster doesn't check for email validity before it sends, but when bounces come in, they can be automatically processed to be either deleted from your list(s) or simply deactivated.  Also supports Subscribe and Unsubscribe links as well as tons of other features.

Inexpensive, feature packed and has served me well for several years now. Importing addresses from CSV and other formats is fully supported.  

Hope that's helpful.