How to contact a mail server?

[Sammy S]

In a form there is a text box for an email address ? is there a way to validate
the email address, or to contact the mail server, to find out if the email
address is legitimate?

Does the tag cfhttp do it? if yes, the how. Can someone please point me to
some good articles?

I want to code this, not buy it.

Here?s a good [url]http://verify.addresses.com/email_verify.php[/url].

Thanks.

[rmorgan]

If you are just wanting to make sure the email address entered follows the
email formatting rules, you can add the validate attribute to the text box. If
you are wanting to check and see if it even exists on that mail server, cfldap
might be what you need.

[Sammy S]

Thank you rmorgan...

It seems that cfldap is what I need to use. I read about it in the book
'Developing ColdFusion MX Applications with CFML', provided with the CF
documentation, but I need more information on available LDAP servers and how to
query them.

For example, if I have the email address [email]someone@somewhere.com[/email], who do I
contact to find out if the domain name 'somewhere.com' is a valid domain name,
and then who do I query to find if 'someone' is a registered user. (or if the
'@somewhere' is setup as a catch-all email address)?

Can you help?

Again, thanks.

[rmorgan]

I dont think you are going to be able to actually pull all of that off, since
you will be trying to query someone elses user base. You will not have
permission into their system, and I would be willing to bet they would not be
willing to give out info about their users.