

Many mail servers and anti-spam gateways will defer the recipient check until after the message is received, so the ok response for the recipient verb might not mean anything.ģ. Verifying your email addresses via the broken SMTP handshake is not a reliable or safe-sending practice.Ģ. Thousands of messages with this behavior looks like a bad actor, and could get your IP blocked. One message getting disconnected before the message is received is normal for an internet mail server. If you do it often, it’s obvious in the logs what’s happening. But, there are a couple of issues with the broken SMTP handshake:ġ. It seems like the perfect plan-you get to verify the address without risking your reputation, avoiding any messages that could be marked as spam. The end result is the same: the server has accepted (or rejected) the recipient email address, but you haven’t actually sent them a message. The SMTP protocol allows this using a reset or quit command, or you can simply close the TCP connection.

After getting the response to the recipient command, you stop the transaction without sending the data. With a broken SMTP handshake (shown on the right), you start an SMTP conversation and go through the steps to send a message. After the message content is sent to the server, the server will typically accept the message and the client can either send a new message or “QUIT” to close the connection. In a standard SMTP conversation (shown on the left), the last command you’d send is “DATA.” This command tells the server that the client is ready to send the message content. Broken SMTP handshakeĪnother option is to use a broken SMTP handshake. While in theory this is a good option, it’s not the most practical. The problem is that virtually all mail servers don’t allow remote connections to verify addresses.

If you open a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection to a SMTP server, the VRFY command is supposed to validate the address. The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) includes a command for verifying an address, VRFY. We’ll share a few methods of verifying email addresses, our recommendations, and what you should avoid.
#VERIFY EMAIL ORG CODE VERIFICATION#
Sometimes that isn’t an option, or you want to quickly clean up your contact list, and need to look at alternative verification methods. The gold standard is to send recipients a confirmation email with a verification link, then continue to regularly engage with them over time. How do you know the email address is valid? Here at Twilio SendGrid, we’ve seen all sorts of problems with email addresses from simple typos to bad actors deliberately using spam trap addresses. So you have an email address from a new contact, say a new signup for your site.
