Process to automate testing of a large email list to remove non working ones

[questorfla]

I have  a huge list of email addresses that are all part of  system used to maintain contact with people we have worked with in the past.

Since some of these names are pretty old, their contact info is out of date.  When we send out an group of updates to them several always get returned for bad addresses but they are scattered and make it difficult for anyone to stop what they are doing, hunt down the bounced ones and see if we need to try contacting them a different way or if maybe someone entered the name wrong to start with.

I can pull every email address in the database into a single list and I know of several services I can use to singly enter each email to check them one at a time and make note of those that are incorrect.  This would be an extremely long task.  I have seen on line services that offer to do it for you with lists of up to 100 names but I am not sure this would be a good idea to hand off these lists to an on line service I do not know personally.

I am looking for a program that would allow me to do the same thing on our own system or at worst, a way to automate the single-file one at a time method.  AHK maybe but I am not that familiar with it.  I don't mind buying a program that would include other nice features such a separating the lists by alphabetic or other and into working and non working address lists.

Does anyone know of anything specific that might be able to do this?  The input list could be in Excel or text or whatever is needed.  Same for the output.

Thanks

[MilesAhead]

How about another approach?  Set up a filter on incoming mail to put all the bounces into a Bounced Folder or forward them to the account of one lucky person?  Or maybe a dummy email account. Just check the bounced ones for errors in the address.  Those with no error process to acquire new contact info.

[questorfla]

How about another approach?  Set up a filter on incoming mail to put all the bounces into a Bounced Folder or forward them to the account of one lucky person?  Or maybe a dummy email account. Just check the bounced ones for errors in the address.  Those with no error process to acquire new contact info.

Not a bad idea but wont solve the problem.  I need to preempt the errors from occurring .  Due to the way this database program works, any error files cause the thing to stop until someone fixes the problem.  Maybe I am not saying the question correctly. 

This is involving a database that is already loaded with all these records.  This is not incoming email nor outgoing email at this time.  It is an issue of having all the email addresses in all the records be correct or at least "good" and valid email addresses before the system tries to pull a data run for the user and when it does, and hits records with invalid emails, it causes issues for the people who pulled the reports. 

I need to either fix or remove those records with bad email addresses so that errors do not occur at all.  To that end, I have extracted ALL addresses with links back to the records they go to.  If i can find the ones that are incorrect or at least show up as "invalid" to outlook, then I can pull all the attached record into a folder and ..Yes..Hopefully... I can then pass it along to someone else.

[Ath]

• Export the list of e-mail addresses to a text file
• Run a script across that file to remove all valid e-mail addresses
• Pre- and post-pend all remaining with the sql to disable these records (assuming you have a column for that in the database)
• Run the script on your database
• Run the e-mail send script, excluding the flagged records

If the e-mail send script is in a formal programming language, lik Java, C#, php, etc., it should probably validate the e-mail before trying to send it, some sql dialects allow to cater for that using a LIKE or even a regex, if you press it hard enough