For the first time ever I sent out a one-time mass mailing to my board's members to tell them to log in to refresh their accounts or be purged after three months of inactivity.

I got HUNDREDS of undeliverable bounce-backs from the mailing, because people had put things like "I dont have one" in the email address field, or "justme@hotmail" or "justme.hotmail.com" and hundreds of similar bad entries.

The register routine should do a simple check on the format of the email address and check that there are no spaces, one "@", at least one ".", and an acceptable suffix like "com" "net" "org" "ca" "uk" "ru" and all the other common ones. And a minimum of 4 or 5 characters long.

Asking someone to enter a correct email address would cut waaaaaay down on the number of "dead" memberships in everyone's boards.

Would this be hard to do in PHP?

I thought there already was checks in place? I just tried registering on my test site and couldn't do it untill I put in a valid email address.

I'm using 6.1br1 at the site. Not sure about older versions but I think this was addressed a few versions back already.

I'm using 6.03, and apparently people have been signing up with badly-formed email addresses under this version.

I think the syntax check for emails was added in 6.1.

Here's the check in 6.1b3:

code:
// Check the email format 
if (!eregi(
      "^[0-9a-z]([-_.+]?[0-9a-z])*@[0-9a-z]([-.]?[0-9a-z])*\.[a-wyz][a-z](g|l|m|pa|t|u|v|z|fo)?$",
      $Email)) {
      $html -> not_right($ubbt_lang['BAD_FORMAT'],$Cat);
}

---

Okay, thanks... I'll have to wait for 6.1 to go live then, since I don't want to run beta code on my live board.

Thanks.

I was using the email check in 6.0.x and it worked fine. It also blocked them from using the same email addy a second time. It seemed to be working fine for me, and I did not alter that part of the code.

One thing I've seen on some other sites is a confirmation check of some sort. Basically, a new member signs up and an email is sent to their email address. In the email there is a URL they click which brings them back to the site and confirms their registration. A time limit of say 7 days ( or configurable by the admin ) to confirm the email before the user is purged from the database. Once confirmed, normal business. Meanwhile, the new member can log in any time prior to confirming the email.

Does this make sense?

That's a good idea. You might want to repost it in the Ubb.threads Feature Suggestions forum at Infopop Community.

One could also verify the email address actually exists using the getmxrr() function. This will check and see if an MX record exists for the host. If not there is no where for the email to go.

I suggest that the email has to be verified also when it is changed from the "My Home"
Why so much verification if it can be changed lattrer on with not trace of the originally coinfirmed email address?

Just another suggestion