How to Verify an Email Address?

How do you verify if a given email address is real or fake? Well an obvious solution is that you send a test mail to that email address and if your message doesn’t bounce, it is safe to assume* that the address is real.

[*] Some web domains may have configured a catch-all email address meaning that messages addressed to a non-existent mailbox will not be returned to the sender but in most cases, such email messages will bounce.

Ping an Email Address to Validate it!

When you send an email to someone, the message goes to an SMTP server which then looks for the MX (Mail Exchange) records of the email recipient’s domain.

For instance, when you send an email to hello@gmail.com, the mail server will try to find the MX records for the gmail.com domain. If the records exist, the next step would be to determine whether that email username (hello in our example) is present or not.

Using a similar logic, we can verify an email address from the computer without actually sending a test message. Here’s how:

Let say that we want to verify if the address billgates@gmail.com exists or not?

Step 1. Enable telnet in Windows.  Or if you already have the PuTTY utility, skip this step.

Step 2. Open the command prompt and type the following command:

nslookup –type=mx gmail.com

This command will extract and list the MX records of a domain as shown below. Replace gmail.com with the domain of the email address that you are trying to verify.

gmail.com MX preference=30, exchanger = alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
gmail.com MX preference=20, exchanger = alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
gmail.com MX preference=5,  exchanger = gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
gmail.com MX preference=10, exchanger = alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
gmail.com MX preference=40, exchanger = alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com

Step 3. As you may have noticed, it is not uncommon to have multiple MX records for a domain. Pick any one of the servers mentioned in the MX records, may be the one with the lowest preference level number (in our example, gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com), and “pretend” to send a test message to that server from you computer.

For that, go to command prompt window and type the following commands in the listed sequence:

3a: Connect to the mail server:

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

3b: Say hello to the other server

HELO

3c: Identify yourself with some fictitious email address

mail from:<labnol@labnol.org>

3d: Type the recipient’s email address that you are trying to verify:

rcpt to:<billgates@gmail.com>

The server response for ‘rcpt to’ command will give you an idea whether an email address is valid or not. You’ll get an “OK” if the address exists else a 550 error like:

• abc@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.

That’s it! If the address is valid, you may perform reverse email search to find the person behind the address. And if you get stuck somewhere, this step-by-step video should help:

 

Create a Career Tree from your LinkedIn Profile

This diagram illustrates the career path of the American President – the branches represent his education and the work experience. I think the size of the circles represent the relative time spent in a particular role.

If you would like to have something similar for your own career, simple head over to Newsweek.com and import your LinkedIn profile.

The more details you have in your LinkedIn profile, the ‘fuller’ your tree will be. You may also add details of your career to the tree manually using the “career tree form” available on the same page without changing your main LinkedIn profile.

Movie Scenes turned into Animated GIFs

Animated GIF images may remind you of those cluttered and distracting homepages of the Geocities era but take a peek at this impressive tumblr blog and it might forever change the way you think of GIFs.

The site features a brilliant collection of GIF animations created using frames of classic movie scenes that play in an endless loop. Here are some examples:

How to Create GIF Animations?

There are free tools available that let you easily convert video clips into animated GIFs that you can later host on sites like Flickr or Tumblr -- not all image hosting sites support animated GIFs but the one mentioned here do.

This is a two-step process – first convert the video into a sequence of image frames and then assemble these frames into a looping GIF animation with some custom delay.

Step 1: Download FFmpeg for Windows from sourceforge.net and extract the ffmpeg.exe file to, say, the c:\ffmpeg\ folder. The .7z files can be unzipped using the 7-zip utility.

Step 2: Now we’ll extract the frames from our video file. The command* is simple.

c:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe -i movie.avi img-%03d.gif

If your video file is in another folder, you need to specify the full path of that file. Also, you may use MP4, MOV or any video format as well instead of AVI.

Step 3: Grab this portable utility called UnFreez and drag-n-drop all the image frames created in the previous step from Windows Explorer into the UnFreez window.

Enable “loop animation” and set the frame delay to say 20 cs (1 cs = 0.01 second).  Click “Make animated GIF” and preview your image is in any browser.

Screencast: Converting videos into GIF movies

[*] If you have a fairly long video file and would only like to convert a portion of it into an image, you need to slightly modify the ffmpeg parameters as shown below:

c:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe -i movie.avi –ss 5 –t 3 img-%03d.gif

The parameter ‘ss’ refers to the start position in the video while ‘t’ is the duration for which you want to extract the frames. So in the above example, image frames for the file movie.avi will be at created from the 5 second mark for the next 3 seconds on the video.

If you would like to stop GIFs from animating in the browser, just hit the Escape key.

Browse the Web with your Email Address

Web2PDF is an extremely useful web based service that lets you browse the web using your email address.

Compose a new email message, type the URL of any web page in the body of that message and send it to submit@web2pdfconvert.com. The service will then fetch the corresponding web page on its own servers and will send it back it you as a PDF attachment – all this takes no more than a few seconds.

I have tried this service will several web pages, including ones that have complex layouts, and the conversion was more or less perfect in all cases (see examples here and here). The converted PDFs not only retain the layout but also the hyperlinks and thus you may fetch other internal pages as well using email itself.

Such a service may come handy in quite a few situations like when you have access to email but general web access is restricted. Or when you are surfing the web on an old mobile phone with a pathetic browser – in that case, the built-in PDF reader may be a better option for reading web articles.

Shop at Any Online U.S. Store from Anywhere

This is a guide for people living outside the U.S. who would like to order products from U.S. based online stores (like Amazon.com or Best Buy) and get them shipped to a non-US address even if the store offers no international shipping.

Shop at Online U.S. Stores from anywhere!

Are you craving to own that latest mobile phone that just launched in the USA and may take months to reach your country. Or are you getting a great deal on some product at an online store but they won’t ship it to your country?

Well, if you have an international credit card and don’t mind paying the shipping costs, custom duties and other charges, here are some services that can help you shop at your favorite online U.S. stores from anywhere.

1. eBay with Worldwide Shipping

You normally use your country specific eBay site for shopping (like eBay.in for India) but with the same account, you can also shop on eBay.com, eBay.co.uk and all the other eBay websites.

Here’s a tip – while looking for products on eBay.com, set the “Items available to” advanced search option to your country’s name and eBay will then only show you items where the seller has indicated that they are willing to ship to your country.

2. Appoint a Virtual Cousin in US

Imagine having a cousin in America. You go to Amazon.com, buy some electronic gadgets and music DVDs using your own credit card but give your cousin’s address for delivery. Amazon ships the stuff to your cousin’s place who then ships it to you.

Package forwarding services like vPost, Shipito, comGateway and Borderlinx are like your ‘virtual’ cousins. They’ll provide you with a personal U.S. address that you can use as the delivery address when shopping at any of the online U.S. stores be it Amazon, Gap, Macy’s or Apple.com.

When your package arrives at their warehouse, they’ll forward them to you via DHL or FedEx just like your helpful cousin. If you choose to buy from multiple stores, like a router from eBay and a camera from Amazon, these ‘forwarding’ services will repackage everything into one parcel so as to reduce the overall shipping cost.

3. Shopping without your Credit Card

Even if you give them a US address, some US merchants won’t accept payments through international credit cards that don’t have a US based billing address. And then there could be some people who may not have an international credits card at all.

If you are one of those, or if you are trying to shop at a store that won’t accept your non-US credit card, you can either use the Assisted Purchase service from Shipito or the BuyForMe service from comGateway to make the purchase.

With Assisted Purchase, you send the payment via Wire Transfer to Shipito who will then make the purchase on your behalf. In the case of BuyForMe, you can make the payment to comGateway using PayPal or any credit card and they’ll use their own card to pay the merchant(s).

International Shopping in India

If you are living in India, in addition to the above mentioned services, you should also check out ShopYourWorld.com. Here, as you buy items from the various online stores, they are all added to a common shopping cart and you pay for everything in one go.

ShopYourWorld will always give you a fixed landing price for your order which includes the cost of the items, shipping charges as well as the custom duties and taxes, if any. No last-minute surprises!

Shop at Any Online U.S. Store from Anywhere

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.