Check if an email address exists before sending the email. Uses Telnet.

Many online services (https://hunter.io, http://verify-email.org, http://email-checker.net) offer this service for a paid fee. Here is an open-source alternative to those tools.

Make sure you have Telnet installed.

./checkEmail.sh [email protected]

Outputs true if email exists, false if it doesn't.

Some mail providers validate sender's mail address before respond, so you should give a valid mail address as sender's mail.

You can do this by one of the following methods:

export [email protected]
./checkEmail.sh [email protected]

or

./checkEmail.sh [email protected] [email protected]

This is really a draft version of the tool, for my personal uses. If someone wants to improve it (and it's easy), please submit a PR. The code is really easy, but needs some improvement to be deliverable to the public.

The main Bash script (checkEmail.sh) calls an expect script (expectTelnet.sh) to make a Telnet call to the host with ports 587, 465 and 25.

See the LICENSE file.