Managing e-mailing lists in CRM application

[StewartUK]

I'm looking at incorporating managing emailing lists from within my CRM application and hoped someone might be able to give me some pointers.

Our IT manager has said that he's found applications available that will manage emailing lists. Do you know of any good ones? Any that can be run through automation perhaps?

I understand (from the IT manager) that they are able to determine if an email address actually exists or not, rather than just checking if the address looks genuine. How would they do that?

Any other pointers/advice can you give me or pitfalls you can warn me of would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Stewart

 

[Mike Lewis]

Stewart,

Given your very wide experience of designing data-based applications, I would have thought you could easily build an email list manager within VFP. If you can create an entire CRM application, how hard can it be to add a module to process email addresses?

If I have misunderstood (or underestimated) what you are trying to do, my apologies.

As for verifying that a given email address actually exists, I doubt that is possible. You can check that the domain exists easily enough, but within the domain, the users have completely free reign over the addresses they can create. There is no central registry of such addresses, as far as I know.

At the very least, you would need to send some sort of message to the recipient's mail server to query the existence of the address. But you have no control over the way the server would respond to such a message, if at all.

If I'm wrong about this, I hope someone can give you a better answer. In the meantime, I suggest you take steps to ensure that your users enter and edit email addresses with the same care as they would deal with postcodes and phone numbers.

Mike




__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

My Visual FoxPro site: www.ml-consult.co.uk

 

[Steve Bowman]

look into

http://hexillion.com/hg/asp-email-verification-component/

the basics are the fact that you can telnet into any smtp mail server and using the commands attempt to send a email
lookup to email domain MX record
telnet to the above result at port 25
telnet mx.server.com 25

[Contacting mx.server.com ]
[Connected]
220 mx.server.com (mxus4) Welcome to Nemesis ESMTP server
EHLO myfromdomain.com
250-mx.server.com pleased to meet you
250-PIPELINING
250-8BITMIME
250-SIZE 52428800
250 HELP
MAIL FROM:<me@myfromdomain.com>
250 mail from: <me@myfromdomain.com> ok
RCPT TO:<emailtocheck@somedomain.com>
250 <emailtocheck@somedomain.com> ok &&this is what you are looking for

RSET
250 OK
QUIT
221 mxserver.com Bye

this would try to send an email without actually sending one

the benifit of the control is that it will do the MX lookup then attempt the communication to the address and simply return a sucess value

Steve Bowman
Independent Technology, Inc.
CA, USA

 

[StewartUK]

Mike - thanks for that vote of confidence! Yes, I think I can build a suitable module, but wanted to see if there was any wisdom out there that I could apply.

Steve - I went on that link, I tried one of their online demos. It returned an OK for addresses that are most unlikely, for example agpszglsurncl-at-fish.co.uk. And at $600 for company-wide use. Must admit I don't understand your references to telnet & MX record.

Stewart

 

[Steve Bowman]

just a basic insight how to test for valid email by talking to the delivering server and just asking if the email is valid. If you talk to the server responsable for my email delivery and try to send to me it will return either ok or not ok. This approach use to be easy until SPAM became such a big problem so now anymore some servers apply several layers that can prevent this form of direct communication.

The way to find my delivery server you would need to look up my MX record it will tell you the ip address

Steve Bowman
Independent Technology, Inc.
CA, USA

 

[Steve Bowman]

Also some follow-up
as with you a test to the mail server at fish.co.uk accepts all address reguardless of the receipient address thus for this address NOTHING can validate to any address within this domain.

the scourage of Email SPAM makes life difficult for everyone and most servers out there have some form of blocking/filtering. This server uses a method that just eats everything.

this control does indeed do what it is designed to do and is only returning the result of talking directly to the intended receipient's (address to test) email server and asking if the address is valid. [a Method Mike eluded to]

I have this control working in a 20,000 company database with 5 + contacts or more so this is upwards of 100,000+ email address and the amount of bad email address collection has been reduced to less then 3%

Steve Bowman
Independent Technology, Inc.
CA, USA

 

[StewartUK]

Steve,

Thanks for your last post. Interesting and encouraging. I'll give it some more thought.

Thanks,

Stewart