Re^2: Finding if email addresses exist?

[mikeraz]

Among the other reasons to not use this approach mentioned already is . . . Some spam fighting systems, mine included, monitor the maillog and quickly throw up a firewall rule blocking access to the system as soon as delivery is attempted to an invalid address. The object is to block dictionary attacks. The benefit is that your system no longer processes email destined for bogus addresses. There's a side effect of the sender being cut off after the first invalid address so any spam addressed to multiple adressees will never get delivered to legit addressees either.

[ww]

...but a horrid problem for the lex-dysic... whose wife has personal and business accounts: fi_lname@work... and lname_fi@personal...

So if I botch an address with lname_fi@work..., her server there is gonna, forever afterward, bounce (or worse, simply dev\nul it) until she cleans my IP out of the filter?

Agreed (I'D YELL AGREEMENT! but that would be impolite... but isn't that solution rather draconian (or, alternately, is there something here I don't understand)?

[mikeraz]

Dyslexia? That's what address books are for. As it is I lock 'em out for six minutes. A spammer goes on. A legit email will eventually bounce and then can send again.

Draconian? My tiny little home system went from processing over 30,000 incoming emails a day to ~4,800.