How to Check if an Email Address Exists (without sending anything)

everyone this is tony teaches tech i'm tony and in this video i'm going to show you how to check if an email address exists without ever needing to send the email address any message we can do this with the combination of the telnet command and the dig command okay so dig is going to allow us to look up the server name the server domain name of the email server and the telnet command we can basically log into that server and interact with it and do some queries there to see if the email address exists or not so let me show you how to do this uh and just before we do that the reason that uh this came like to the top of my mind is because i've been getting a lot of spam emails for my website at the diamond app and the spam emails none of the emails seem to exist like this one the error was sorry your message to this guy cannot be delivered this inbox is disabled this one user unknown to campbell r hughes.net uh this one uh requested mail action aboard it mailbox.found so i got a lot of weird messages like that and i just wanted to see if there's a way that i could with a command check to see if these email addresses existed or not and turns out that that is definitely the case so let's minimize this and open up a terminal window and like i said we're going to use the dig command and the telnet command to figure this out so because most of these um well first of all let's figure out the the uh i guess the for my personal email address let's figure out which is gmail let's figure out what the domain name for the email server is so we can do that with digg gmail.com and look up the mx records for that so it looks like the main the main domain name is gmail dash smtp dash in dot l.google.com so let's copy that onto our clipboard and then we can use the telnet command to telnet into that server and interact with it that way so let's do telnet that domain name and then port 25 which is the the report for email um and it looks like telnet is not found hell oh because i spelled it wrong t-e-l-n-e-t okay so we are uh this is good this means that we are um connected to the server and the first thing you want to do is issue an h-e-l-o gmail.com command and you'll get the response from the server 250 mx.google.com at your service okay so the basic syntax here is we're going to go through a series of mail from receipt to commands okay and it's basically just going to i don't know in my eyes like simulate without ever sending anything the interaction between the two servers so let's do uh mail from tony teaches tech at gmail.com and then we'll do we got an okay so that's it likes that and then we do a receipt to tony nicholas arizona at gmail.com so this is in this case we want to check to see if this email address exists and we hit enter and we get a 250 back so that is okay now let's check another email address let's repeat the process so we do mail from tony teaches tech gmail.com and let's do receipt 2 and i'm going to copy one of the email addresses that i know was sent to my inbox and it was fake so we'll do receipt to strawny1 gmail.com hit enter and the response this time is the email account that you tried to reach does not exist uh please try double checking the receipt recipient's email address for typos or unnecessary spaces learn more here okay so no such user was the uh the result of that interaction between uh my email address and that user's email address and you you can keep doing this so i have probably like 50 different email addresses that were for whatever reason spambots or something signed up for the the sign up page on my diamond website um so let's check another one let's do um and i'll just to save some time i'll i'll copy it so mail from tonyteacherstech gmail.com then we'll do receipt two uh and this one is a non-gmail account so gmail can interact with uh non-gmail accounts as well so receipt to michael.merchant comcast.net and based on the interaction the email account that you tried to reach does not exist please try to blah blah no such user okay same type of thing let's try one more and this one i tested this recently so i hope it'll still work so mail from tony at tony teaches dot tech that looks good notice how i'm not using gmail anymore and then receipt to shari shari.sherman gmail.com this one throws a different error message the user trying to contact his receiving mail at a rate that prevents additional messages from being delivered please resend your message at a later time so this uh this is based on the receiving rate this user is not um i guess there's just like a flood of email coming into this user's box it it it does exist it's just being overwhelmed at a rate that gmail can't accept any more messages uh coming into it so um you can keep going through this same process uh mail from receipt to mail from and if you try to do uh this is what i've noticed if you try to do two receipt twos in a row um it'll say multiple destination domains per transaction is unsupported please try again so that's why you always have to do the mail from and then the receipt too so hopefully this uh will give you a better idea about how to check if an email address exists before like ever sending a message to that email address a quick pretty much low impact way to do that if you have any questions about it let me know in the comments below doing best to help you out i want to thank you guys for watching give this video a thumbs up subscribe for more videos like this from me in the future and if you do i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Tony Teaches Tech

Views: 30,620

Keywords: does this email exist, check if email exists, how to check if email exists, check if email address exists without sending email, check if google email exists, check email exist or not, check if an email id exists, dig command email, rcpt to command 550, telnet email test, telnet email test command

Id: qmIlg8qmVaQ

Length: 7min 4sec (424 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021