Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

how to check for old addresses?

Aug 8, 2010 12:38AM PDT

hello guys, I hope you can help.

many of my outlook contacts e-mail addresses are now out of date.

--> Is there an add-in or program which can scan through my contacts [either in Outlook or in an exported file], search out, verify and delete the e-mail addresses which are no longer in use please?

I would be grateful for any tips from the experts.

Best,

Jon

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
I'm not sure that's possible
Aug 8, 2010 5:46AM PDT

Even email spammers don't do this as far as I know. They just send out millions of spam emails to random generated email addresses, and discard any that are returned.

What I mean is, there would have to be some method to sniff out current email addresses by interrogating email servers or web-mail servers, but those server administrators would work very hard to protect the privacy of their customers.

The hard way would be to send a quick query email to each address, and any that are returned unread will be out of date. But of course, you may not want to contact all of them.

You don't say in what context this is, eg an office environment, your own business, or just your personal email account, but I don't see any easy way. For my personal account it is easy. I just delete those I don't want any more, and keep those I do, eg relatives, friends, known recent contacts, etc.

Mark

- Collapse -
Re: check for old addresses
Aug 8, 2010 8:18AM PDT

All you can do: send a mail to each address. If it's returned with an error, something is wrong with it. There's no centralized data store of valid email addresses. The mail server at the destination is the only one who knows and he'll tell you if necessary (that is, if you try to send a mail to an address that doesn't exist anymore or has a full mailbox or such an error). It's said to "bounce" in such cases.

Sending a mail can be done either manually or by some Outlook macro you'll have to write (or have written by a programmer with some experience in progamming Outlook). I don't know of any existing program.

Kees