Timothy -
Remember that if you go this route, there are plenty of address extensions beyond com, net, gov, edu - every nation in the world has a valid extension (I think the term of art is "top-level domain"). For instance, the USA has a .us extension, though it's not frequently used. I believe the complete list can be found on the ANSI website.

However, I don't have an answer for the larger question (how to validate an e-mail address). Even if you had access to a finger command, I don't know that finger returns a hit for every valid e-mail address.

Of course, you could always spam them ... but that doesn't seem conducive to positive customer relations :)
zahid

>I don't have a total solution, but you can first run a check on form: Every address has a name, and '@' symbol, another name and ".EXT" where EXT is any of the accepted COM, NET, EDU etc.
>
>After that, you could add a return mail macro to put anything returned by the Mailer Daemon into its own folder. You can then write an OLE Automation procedure to get these email addresses and flag them in the original database.
>
>HTH
>Barbara
>
>>I need to validate a list of thousands of e-mail addresses. Does anybody know of a way to easily check whether the addresses are deliverable without actually sending a message? (something like the "finger" command??)
>>
>>TIA