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Check If Email Exists

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Re: Check If Email Exists

#51

Post by DoctorDabadedoo »

rudyfink wrote: post #22
gh2k wrote: post #21

I hope nobody uses this for anything serious. I run my own domain and use - @ to have a unique email for everything I sign up to. I have no email address that this counts as anything other than "risky". If this opts me out of marketing mail then that's probably a good thing, but I hope nobody puts a password-reset or security/billing notifications behind it.

Would you mind sharing your experience on how well that has worked for you? Has the complexity of maintaining different addresses been a problem? I ask because it is something I have always thought about, but I suppose I kept hoping a service would come along and magic the solution for me. Kudos on making it happen!

There is a service for that: https://anonaddy.com/

I've used it briefly for testing purposes and I have no complaints about it, it delivered what I expected with no hiccups.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#52

Post by blackearl »

reid wrote: post #30
Cyberdog wrote: post #8

Could someone spell out a use case for this? One that comes to mind would be validating that a mailing list doesn't have any outdated email addresses in it, but couldn't that be determined by just checking for a bounce when a message is sent to it? I tried to sign up for SiriusXM the other day, and though I could create an account with my .pro email address, I couldn't actually sign up for service with that same addr…

I bought a new car a few years ago and I was unable to enter my .life email address into the SiriusXM registration form in the car. Had to use a .com address :(

I specifically bought a cheap .org since some companies have trouble with lesser known TLDs

Re: Check If Email Exists

#54

Post by daniellarusso »

Cyberdog wrote: post #8

Could someone spell out a use case for this? One that comes to mind would be validating that a mailing list doesn't have any outdated email addresses in it, but couldn't that be determined by just checking for a bounce when a message is sent to it? I tried to sign up for SiriusXM the other day, and though I could create an account with my .pro email address, I couldn't actually sign up for service with that same addr…

We have been auditing legacy user accounts to begin a mapping to Zendesk, and Zendesk allows mapping to ‘organizations’ via email domain.

For some of these legacy accounts, the registered email addresses may have typos.

So, even a basic DNS check against the existence of the domain’s MX record is helpful.

Any of the ‘suspect’ email addresses can then be further evaluated by a human, and then removed or fixed.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#55

Post by dgl »

Aside from the questionable aspects of this it doesn’t even understand some aspects of how email works. It requires MX records, but it’s fine to just have an A record and accept email there, I do that for one of my personal domains and this says it’s invalid, but nothing else has ever had a problem with it.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#56

Post by NetOpWibby »

cstrat wrote: post #45
reid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I just accept wildcard *@mydomain and give out a unique name for every business. Works very well and I blocked a few businesses by which do not allow for opt-out and/or shared my address with others. This is easy to do with the Alias feature of FastMail.

Yeah I do the same thing with FastMail - its awesome. Here is a recent story where this came in handy. I recently had a spam phone call from someone fishing for personal information, using a 'survey' as cover. During the call I learned that they had my email address as 'ledger@xxxx.xxx'. This must have come from the Ledger data breach ( https://www.ledger.com/message-ledgers-ceo-data-leak ). This made the call even m…

That’s terrifying.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#57

Post by mkr-hn »

gh2k wrote: post #21

I hope nobody uses this for anything serious. I run my own domain and use - @ to have a unique email for everything I sign up to. I have no email address that this counts as anything other than "risky". If this opts me out of marketing mail then that's probably a good thing, but I hope nobody puts a password-reset or security/billing notifications behind it.

Somehow my domain that I've owned without interruption for ~20 years got on a list of throwaway email services.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#58

Post by SilverRed »

rudyfink wrote: post #22
gh2k wrote: post #21

I hope nobody uses this for anything serious. I run my own domain and use - @ to have a unique email for everything I sign up to. I have no email address that this counts as anything other than "risky". If this opts me out of marketing mail then that's probably a good thing, but I hope nobody puts a password-reset or security/billing notifications behind it.

Would you mind sharing your experience on how well that has worked for you? Has the complexity of maintaining different addresses been a problem? I ask because it is something I have always thought about, but I suppose I kept hoping a service would come along and magic the solution for me. Kudos on making it happen!

I did it for ages and eventually stopped. It gets awkward when you have to deal with customer support people and I never caught any spammers via the method anyway. Difficulty wise it was trivial since all emails hit my main address.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#59

Post by antihero »

adamparsons wrote: post #44
adamparsons wrote: post #42

My email address reachability is "unknown", its a fastmail hosted account. Quite a commonly used service. Is an unknown classification supposed to be treated as "I don't know, probably safe" or "I don't know, probably don't accept it" ?

{ "input": "***redacted***", "is_reachable": "unknown", "misc": { "is_disposable": false, "is_role_account": false }, "mx": { "accepts_mail": true, "records": [ "in2-smtp.messagingengine.com.", "in1-smtp.messagingengine.com." ] }, "smtp": { "error": { "type": "TimeoutError", "message": "future has timed out" } }, "syntax": { "address": "***redacted***", "domain": "***redacted***", "is_valid_syntax": true, "username":…

I mean I get the TimeoutError on the demo page.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#60

Post by SilverRed »

thebeefytaco wrote: post #40
gh2k wrote: post #21

I hope nobody uses this for anything serious. I run my own domain and use - @ to have a unique email for everything I sign up to. I have no email address that this counts as anything other than "risky". If this opts me out of marketing mail then that's probably a good thing, but I hope nobody puts a password-reset or security/billing notifications behind it.

Glad to see I'm not the only person who does that! Great way to catch those who share/sell your email and to set up filtering.

I did this for 3 years and did not find a single case of spammers using one of the emails. All spam was from the sites I signed up with. Email spam filters catch spam for you.
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