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Re: E-mail Address in WEB Browser
Sorry, I guest I did not make my self clear the first time. I want to know
if there are write up or plan to make the E-mail address you put in the web
browser more secure.
For example, I can put somebody-else E-mail address (on the mail server I
am using) on my Netscape Web browser, and visit some web site and sent
"mailto" messages under that assume name. The mail would be sent to the
"mailto" address as the person I have put in the E-Mail options
of the Netscape browser.
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Original Text
>From Dave Dittrich <dittrich@cac.washington.edu>, on 12/13/95 06:07 PM:
> Can anyone tell me or is there any write up on the issue of verifying the
> E-Mail address that is entered into the WEB Browser.
You could use a tool called "expn" (a Perl script that uses the SMTP
EXPN or VRFY commands to try to validate email addresses), but the
results may not be what you want.
I have tried using such a mechanism to validate email addresses (not
for web services, but to try to expand and validate email addresses
for a question tracking system). I can tell you from my experience
that this is a very difficult and unreliable task (if you care about
using the results to do something akin to directory services; just
checking to see if a given email address will be accepted by an SMTP
delivery agent is a bit more reliable). The main reasons for this are
that the EXPN/VRFY commands of SMTP (the main email delivery protocol
on the Internet) do not give easy to interpret results, MX forwarding
configurations used by many large sites makes it difficult to get the
name (or comment) information that accompanies addresses, and many
email gateways (e.g., AOL, Compuserve, Microsoft Mail servers, etc.)
don't implement EXPN/VRFY commands.
Just pray that something like X.500 (or any other directory service,
for that matter) gets adopted by the industry.
--
Dave Dittrich Client Services, Computing & Communications
dittrich@cac.washington.edu University of Washington
<a href="http://www.washington.edu/People/dad/">
Dave Dittrich / dittrich@cac.washington.edu</a>
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