[AccessD] email validation

To be sure you are right, not to mention spam filters. Lots of problems
authenticating an email address. Our site cautions you that our response
might get bounced, and invites you to regard incoming mail from us as cool,
and to tell your spam-filter so before proceeding. But lots of people may
not know how to do this, some people might be suspicious, and so on. 
There are no simple solutions, I fear. In a business with unlimited
inventory, this is not really an issue, but in the business to which I
refer, the product was seats to a concert by U2 or somebody, and any delay
at all could cause problems, either for us or for the user. I never did come
up with a cool solution. The whole business premise was that we could
contact you by email, so this was deemed critical. Yes, we also asked for
your phone number, but imagine that there are 24 tickets left to a U2
concert. Relying on you not being on the phone (at work or home) is not an
option. In that situation we have to KNOW we can contact you asap, otherwise
even if we put through the credit card charge, then what... a tough problem.
We eventually came up with something that works most of the time, but it is
far from what I imagined as a perfect solution.
A.

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Stuart McLachlan
Sent: January 8, 2006 6:25 PM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: Re: [AccessD] email validation

On 8 Jan 2006 at 18:12, Arthur Fuller wrote:

> to be sure. What I wanted in those contexts was an event that would
> immediately attempt to send a message to the specified address, and holler
> at the user if it failed, placing the cursor back in the email field (in
> case of simple mis-spelling). I never did come to a correct method of
doing
> this. 
> 

A few reasons off the top of my head why this will never work reliably, 
there are probably a number of other reasons as well.

1. Emails are not instant messaging.  A recipient mail server may be 
temporarily unavailable for any number of reasons. Many outbound servers  
retry for up to four days to complete delivery.

2. Many servers accept (or at least appear to accept) all messages for a 
domain whether the individual mailbox address is valid or not.

3. Challenge/response systems :-(

-- 
Stuart