For those of you who administer email servers that communicate with the

internet:

Is it standard SMTP procedure to send a test email to a sender's address to

verify that the address is valid?

My email provider does this, and it causes continuous problems when a POP

client is being used and it is set to hold messages on the server for a

specified number of days. This is not a free email service; we have to pay

for every MB of storage, so huge GMail-style mailboxes are not an option.

Therefore, often the user's mailbox is full, and she/he is therefore not

allowed to send email until s/he forces the server to partially or fully

empty his/her mailbox.

This, in my opinion, is an unfair and poor way to verify the sender's address.

Surely it must be possible for an SMTP server to do sender-verify in a

different way, such as by querying its own table of valid accounts.

Would this still occur with IMAP? As I understand it, IMAP is a retrieval

protocol, not a send protocol. But if an ISP offers IMAP, which, as I

understand it, by default leaves messages on the server, then surely the

ISP must anticipate that many mailboxes will be full and would have to use

some other sender verification strategy.

I am not asking for a referral to some other email service provider.

I am trying to understand what the options are for sender verify and why

people use them.

Thanks for any information.

Ken Dibble

www.stic-cil.org

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