ping an email

[rcusr]

Is there a way to ping an email address?

 

[Grenage]

No, but you can ping the email server (user@domain.com).

 

[rcusr]

Thanks, but not quite what I was looking for... I was hoping to be able to check if a user still exists, without them getting an email from me.

 

[Grenage]

I dont believe there is a way without access to the email server.

 

[rcusr]

ok thanks

 

[Morsing]

Doesn't it tell you that when you give the mail server the 'RCPT TO:' statement?

Cheers

Henrik Morsing
Certified AIX 4.3 Systems Administration
& p690 Technical Support

 

[chaimUsa]

here is a link

http://www.salcentral.com/asp/srch.asp?SRCH=email&PAGE=1

 

[maalobs]

Doing manual NVT to the users' mailservers' smtp-port won't help you much if it is a hardened SMTP-gateway.
It will lie to you and happily accept your email transmission, even if the email-address is invalid.
This is by design, to spoof all would-be spammers, so they can't figure out legal email-addresses.
For the same reason the old SMTP VRFY-method will most certainly be switched off on live mailservers.

VRFY would've solved your problem, though, it was designed just for this purpose.

Or, if you have LDAP-access to his local directory, you may be able to look up his address that way if you know his name.

But why not just call the person and ask him?
Or just try and email him?
What's your motive for being stealthy?

 

[rcusr]

Thanks for the pointers...

Heres why I'm being stealthy - In the industy I work in there can be is normally quite a large turnover of staff... as such our email lists tend to get quite a few bounce backs. Rather than cleaning off these bounce backs I was hoping to run a monthly check across our email lists and see which email address are active and which ones are not.

This also means that I get to have a true figure on the number of active esubscribers we have, without having to email all of the addresses.