How can you tell if an email is a valid email address?

Does anyone know how to check emails to see if they are real or just something someone entered into your opt-in box?

 

you can use regular expression to check the format of an email . but you can not check programaticaly with 100% accuracy if its real or not.

Just put email confirmation so your program send a confirmation email to the address user provided.

 

ok now, what about a street address? anyone know that?

 

I'm not 100% sure what you're asking, sorry ... but I often put street addresses into Google (with and without the number) to see what comes up: can sometimes be very instructive, if something turns out to be some sort of scam previously reported to the Ripoffreport, scam.com or wherever. Street names are in the index of online maps, and should therefore be "searchable". (Please excuse me if I misunderstood the question).

 

for addresses you can try maps like google maps or the whitepages.com site

 

Yahoo maps works too, mapquest.com too ...

 

There are services out there like EmailListCleaning.com where you can take your opt-in list of email addresses and "clean" it, where you would basically get results back on which are non-existant, not proper (i.e. having spaces in them etc.), weed out duplicates, etc. It's probably a good thing to do every once in a while depending onthe size of your list. Some autoresponder and newsletter services even require it if they find your list to be in particularly bad shape.