Comment on Sure thing, website, my name is Gabe Newell
domdanial@reddthat.com 10 months agoWebsites don’t have an actual check for a legit email… That’s why they send confirmation links to click. Forms check that it ends with @something.something, sometimes they can add filters to not allow anything other than the 20 most popular domains. Or they can block addresses with less than 3 characters, because nobody real has those. But most forms you can keyboard smash anything@anything.anything. They just might make a temp account until it’s confirmed or something.
But joeblow@aol.com almost certainly was/is real.
Websites don’t have an actual check for a legit email.
Some do. You can connect to an SMTP server and pretend to send an email (send the EHLO, MAIL FROM, and RCPT TO commands, but dint actually send any content). A lot of servers will immediately reject as soon as you provide an invalid recipient email address
Huh thank you for the more correct information, I didn’t know about those options.
You’re partially right, I’d like to add some details: websites can also check if a domain (e.g. example.com) actually exists. So if you smash random letters on your keyboard and you end up with a non-existing domain, a website will be able to stop you from using that address.
More advanced websites also check for an MX record on the domain DNS. If a domain exists but it doesn’t have an MX record, then it’s not going to be able to receive emails and may be blocked in sign up forms.
Wow thank you for the info, I didn’t know they had such advanced lookups.
Ziglin@lemmy.world 10 months ago
My personal email is less than 3 characters before the @, I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t use it for non human interactions.