Via Lifehacker, a link to Verify Email Address.
If, for whatever reason, you need to verify someone's email address, try Verify-Email.org, a free email address verifier. Just enter in the email addy, click “verify”,and go. The format, domain, and user are all checked by actually connecting to the mail server to see if everything is kopasetic. Somewhat disconcerting, but sure to come in handy in some way.
Seems the like email equivalent of pinging a web site to see if it's there. I guess we need this now that so many sites block finger.
Lifehacker is a funny site. So much of what they say strikes me as obvious or irrelevant to my life; but then there's that very useful 5-10%. Then again, maybe I should aspire to that signal-to-noise ratio…
Sounds like a lovely tool for a spammer collecting valid email addresses.
This is not a terribly reliable tool, because a great many mail servers simply lie & report that *any* email address in their domain(s) is a valid one. (Case in point: try any address of the same degree of improbability as “wer7erhewjrw78wercvrcevwcwds343-r-5-5-swq2@yahoo.com”.) SMTP RCPT TO: was once an effective method for spammers to harvest addresses, as Steve notes above, but — as with finger, SMTP VRFY, and SMTP EXPN — most responsible server admins have implemented countermeasures.