On Wed, 10 Jun 1998, Manar Hussain wrote:
> We've often found the email address validation you get by doing:
> exim -bt <address>
>
> very useful when doing web forms and checking email addresses. So far we
> have use a perl wrapper around a call to exim to do this but of course it's
> not always possible to have access to an installed exim.
>
> Is there any chance that this particular function can be pulled out as a
> seperate tool that can be installed without all of exim being installed? We
> had a bit of a look at it to no real avail.
If exim isn't installed how do you intend to send the mail ?
exim -bt tests how exim would send the mail, so is meaningless
if exim isn't installed.
Not only does a standalone exim-bt tool not make sense, it isn't
practical since the only bits of exim that you could remove are the bits
that deliver the mail; all the network stuff, and probably the routing
would have to stay so that it can validate the address.
Also, since exim -bt says whether you can mail to an address, not whether
it exists, it is dangerous to assume that it gives you the right answer.
My machines are set up so that all mail from my clients is sent to my
mailserver which does the real delivery. As a result exim -bt accepts all
syntactically correct addresses.
Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
A.C.Aitchison@??? http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna
--
*** Exim information can be found at
http://www.exim.org/ ***
