Re: Email Verification

Tom Chubb wrote:

Can anyone offer advice on best practices for email address verification? Obviously for user registration it's common to click a link in your email to complete the process thereby verifying the email, but if you want to keep things very simple for the end user, what are the best methods? I have been looking at getmxrr and the examples feature some good advice, etc. One that I've found that I'm thinking of using is http://www.tienhuis.nl/php-email-address-validation-with-verify-probe which tries to connect to the SMTP server as well as mx lookup, etc. How reliable are these? With new domain name extensions appearing all the time I wanted to find something better than a regex which might become outdated after a while and I'd never know about it! Thoughts please and thanks in advance

Here's what I use. It's simple, uses php5 functions and appears to catch most obvious user input errors. function checkEmailAddr($emailAddr) {

    if(!filter_var($emailAddr, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) throw new Exception("Email address error. Syntax is wrong.");

    $domain = substr(strchr($emailAddr, '@'), 1);

    if(!checkdnsrr($domain))
    {
        throw new Exception("Email address warning. Specified domain \"$domain\" appears to be invalid. Check carefully.");
    }
    return true;

} Use in try/catch code, e.g., try { $emailAddrOK = checkEmailAddr($userSubmitedDataArray[EMAIL_ADDR_FIELD]); } catch (Exception $e) { $errorMsg = $e->getMessage(); //Message text in check function $emailAddrOK= false; }