EmailVerify.NET
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Website: www.emailverify.net
Price: Starts from $49.95
Imagine that you need to create a web application to collect visitors' email addresses. The application may be a simple contact form, an order form, or a survey, and you can run it manually or through an automated message. Web masters often attempt to contact visitors by using the email addresses that visitors provide through such applications. But what happens when the messages bounce because visitors mistyped or deliberately entered fake addresses?
Standard Visual Studio Toolbox controls can verify only the syntax of email IDs. However, syntax verification is not sufficient in this case, as you also need to verify the existence of email IDs. In this scenario, web developers make use of third-party controls, such as EmailVerify.NET, which can verify the status of email addresses in real time. EmailVerify.NET, created by lead developer and owner Efran Cobisi not only ships with a powerful syntax verification engine that fully complies with RFC and IETF standards, but it also checks Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and quoted strings.
Key Features
In addition to syntax verification, EmailVerify.NET helps you verify disposable email addresses and DNS validations, including MX records lookup. Moreover, the product also enables you to check the availability of SMTP and the existence of mailboxes that have greylisting support. It also includes including catch-all testing that the mail sever uses to reject email address that don't exist. The product also automatically recognizes servers that are greylisted and returns the relevant status code. Therefore, developers can implement appropriate exception code into their applications during the development phase itself.
To use EmailVerify.NET in an application, you just need to add a reference to the assembly, call the appropriate namespace, and add a few lines of code. You also have to provide the required license key, which can be obtained from the EmailVerify.NET download area. However, I found that the EmailVerify.NET control was not automatically added to the Visual Studio 2010 Toolbox, as stated in the user guide. I hope the vendor will provide a fix for this issue in future releases.
PowerShell Support
EmailVerify.NET ships with support for Windows PowerShell, and a separate assembly file is included so that you can validate email addresses from within the PowerShell environment. The product also lets developers validate email addresses in batches. This feature is particularly useful for anyone building a mailing list application.
EmailVerify.NET provides comprehensive documentation in easy-to-understand language that clearly examines all the steps associated with using the product. A reference guide provides details of classes, delegates, enumerations, and structures of various namespaces. Moreover, the product includes a sample Windows application that you can use to learn the workings of all the features that are included with the control. The vendor also provides excellent email support. I typically received replies to my questions within 10 minutes.
Make sure that you check out the live demo, an ASP.NET application that shows you how EmailVerify.NET validates email addresses. I would suggest that the vendor provide source code with the product to help beginners get up to speed quickly.
A Powerful Control
In summary, EmailVerify.NET boasts a powerful engine and performs a wide range of email-related functions quickly and efficiently. I'd like to see improve the product's Visual Studio Toolbox integration; otherwise, I find this to be a useful control that performs its specialized task well.
Anand Narayanaswamy ([email protected]) is a Microsoft MVP and ASPInsider who works as an independent consultant based in Trivandrum, India. He is the author of Community Server Quickly (Packt Publishing) and runs www.learnxpress.com and www.dotnetalbum.com.