disappointing

[og_dev]

We purchased email verifier to run on 8000 addresses that we had acquired through an online voting process. (We'd advised the client initially that they should incorporate email validation through a signup/activation process but they declined. They then objected when thousands of addresses where used that were obviously invalid! )

Anyway, I ran email verifier and found that although the results were presented in a lovely "this is bad in red" and "this is good in green" kind of way with pie charts and everything, upon closer inspection things were not quite right.

On the whole where the program marked the "bad" addresses and the "good addresses", these were correct.

It was the in-betweens that were problematic, ie the "looks valid" addresses, and there were a lot of these.

There seemed to be quite a lot of responses from mailservers that were not correctly identified. From memory there were lots of 550's that were flagged as looks valid although the accompanying message would indicate very definitley otherwise.

Also, if a mailserver was set to accept our first 20 connections within a minute, where people had been obviously cheating in the voting with 100s of silly addresses entered in a row, the first 20 of these would be correctly identified as invalid and then, following the connection per minute limit being reached, the next 180 addresses (entered by the same person, with the same squibble@sillydomain.com format) would be marked as "looks valid".

The problem is of course, that being sensitive data, I can't provide the list from which I was working.

All I can say is that we are a technical team at a web company and know about ports and stuff so were not falling into obvious traps. (don't you just hate the know-it-all techy types! )

In short, I'd say this looks like it could eventually be a fab product but it needs to handle ambiguous addresses and server connection limits better.

As it is now, I'm sorry to say it was a waste of time and money for us and we ended up eliminating runs of stupid addresses by hand.

End of rant.