How to Verify Fake or Invalid Email Addresses

Fake email addresses can be used for stilling your confidential data. So, it is recommended that you always check the sender’s email address before clicking any link of the email content or replying that email as that may contain malicious application link and other hacking related stuffs.
Though there are some web applications to detect fake or invalid email ids, you can check an email address by pinging it through the Telnet service in Windows. It is simple and fully reliable. Here are the steps involving in pinging an email address through Telnet.

How to use Telnet to Verify Fake Email Address

1. Enable Telnet if you are using Windows 7 or vista. The XP user should skip this step as Telnet is enabled by default in Windows XP. To enable telnet in Windows 7 or Vista, go to Start > Control Panel > Programs and Features. Now click on ‘Turn Windows features on or off’ link from the left sidebar. Now, tick the ‘Telnet Client’ check box at ‘Windows Features’ dialog window and click ‘OK’.

2. Open command prompt and run the following command:

nslookup –type=mx gmail.com

This command extracts the MX records of a domain and list out them as follows:

Replace the domain name in the above command with the domain of the target email address.
3. From the above MX records, pick up any one of the servers. The lowest preference level number indicates the preferable server. In this example, it is gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
4. Connect to that server by Telnet. To do so, type the following command in the command prompt:

telnet gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 25

This will enter into the Windows Telnet Service.
5. Say Hello to the server: Type the following and hit ‘Enter’.

HELO

6. Type your email address for identification:

mail from:<techtips@techtipsapp.com>

7. Type in the target email address that you want to verify:

rcpt to:<targetaddress@gmail.com>

You will get an idea if the email address is valid or fake from the server responses of the command “rcpt to”. You get a response mentioning OK if the email address is valid otherwise you will get a 550 error like:

• xyz@gmail.com — The email account that you tried to reach does not exist.
• support@gmail.com — The email account that you tried to reach is disabled.

Alternative Way to Detect A Fake Email Addresses

1. Send a test mail to an Email ID, if a failure mail delivery report comes, the Email ID does not exists.
2. There are couple of web service which detect fake Email IDs.Email Address Checker is one of them. Just type the suspicious Email ID and click on Check. In a moment you will see the validity of that ID.

Second one is IsValidEmail. Enter the Email ID and press Invoke.If it returns true as answer, the ID is valid otherwise not.

So, be safe and secured by detecting the fake Email IDs. If these tricks help you, please leave a comment on it.