Check for valid email address

Rails
1

Hi,

I have one small question. I want to check for existence of email
address. Means if user types “[email protected]”, my model should
throw an error to the user saying “email doesn’t exist please check it
once”. How I can do this??

Thanks,
Ramu

2

Do you have this user registered at your site with an email address?

There is no way to “test” a existing email with ex. google or other
email hosts. (The smtp protocol allows for this but its a spam trap to
have this available… )

You do have the ability to test if the domain exists and is a valid
domain… But again this can’t be 100% because not all servers allow
this inquiry and your connection to them might timeout

This would validate the domain (but could fail if you timeout… ):

require ‘resolv’
def validate
unless errors.on(:email)
unless valid_domain?(email)
logger.debug “[DEBUG] - Domain name #{email} has a problem.”
errors.add(:email, ‘domain name appers to be incorrect’)
end
end
end

def valid_domain?(email)
domain = email.match(EMAIL_PATTERN)[2]
dns = Resolv::DNS.new
Timeout::timeout(SERVER_TIMEOUT) do

# Check the MX record
mx_records = dns.getresources(domain,

Resolv::DNS::Resource::IN::MX)

mx_records.sort_by {|mx| mx.preference}.each do |mx|
  a_records = dns.getresources(mx.exchange.to_s,

Resolv::DNS::Resource::IN::A)
return true if a_records.any?
end

#Try a straight A record

a_records = dns.getresources(domain, Resolv::DNS::Resource::IN::A)
a_records.any?
end
rescue Timeout::Error, Errno::ECONNREFUSED
false
end

Using a pattern is faster and just plain easier…

EMAIL_PATTERN = /\A([^@\s]+)@((?:[-a-z0-9]+.)+[a-z]{2,})\Z/i
validates_format_of :email, :with => EMAIL_PATTERN

3

Thank you very much! Any more ideas on how to validate the email
address existence.

4

This doesn’t exactly answer your question, but I think it may answer
your concerns. Send an activation link of some sort to their email
that they need to use to join your website.

That way, if it exists, then they get the email.

Ramon T.

5

What i have done is the followring (it is sort of a summary or a
combination of what @freddy and @ramon said):
first i check that the email is in correct format using this chunk of
code:

validate that password and confirm_password match, and that email is

proper format
def validate_on_create
@email_format = Regexp.new(/^([^@\s]+)@((?:[-a-z0-9]+.)+[a-z]{2,})
$/)
errors.add(:email, “must be a valid format”) unless
@email_format.match(email)
errors.add(:confirm_password, “does not match”) unless password ==
confirm_password
end

which is in the user.rb file
then in my controller i send an email to the user when they register
with a link back to my controller with a hash at the end of it that is
constructed through many ways (google tutorials on this, there are
plenty) and my controller validates that the hash is correct and sets
a boolean attribute of the user (call it email_confirmed if you will)
to true. So the user can not log in to the site unless they have
confirmed their email.

The other approach I have seen many site implement is to send the user
their password to their email, which means they have to provide a
valid email address to be able to log in. I am personally not very
comfortable with sending a password through an email so I prefer to
stay away from that method.

But again, these are not perfect methods, they’re just a way to do
what you want to get done. Maybe if OpenID picks up we won’t have that
problem anymore.