Ways to test email in detail?

want to resolve some issues and locate faults.

[Mark_A]

Have some issues where as often is the case I am not the only person involved.

Want to be able to test results of various emails etc and see exactly what is happenning.

Anyone advise testing methods I can use.

[claus]

My best advice is to use freemail accounts, there's plenty of them out there and they all do different things to the emails it seems (virusscan/html/headers/spamfilter/attachments/forwards/etc.)

If your email can make it through a few of these, it's usually a good one, imho.

/claus

[Mark_A]

hmm good thought.. thanks, am testing with a couple of those at the moment.

Is there any way to ping email addresses and see what response there is to that ...

i.e. to check that the server at the other end is handling things as expected?

[bird]

You could study the SMTP RFCs, connect to the server from a telnet client, and "simulate" what a normal mail client would do manually.

Other than that, the best way to diagnose your problem obviously depends on the nature of the problem, so some more details might result in better suggestions.

[claus]

You can ping the email server, this will show if it's alive but it will not show you the status of an individual address, the returned headers will show that (script posted in related thread).

You can also telnet to the mailserver, there's a brief guide here:
[pages.prodigy.net...]

If it's not your own mailserver you'll probably just get the OK, so it doesn't really provide more info than the ping.

/claus

[Mark_A]

thanks claus and bird ..

I think I have the cause of the problem now .. its a human related thing ... though its not my own fault 100% it may well be something I should have thought about ..

And its far too embarrasing to share with you here :-)
hopefully I can get it fixed quickly ..

Folks just please dont assume *anything* where there are lots of cooks in the kitchen ...

You just dont know what they are all doing in detail unless they spell it out for you!

[nakulgoyal]

There are a lot of Tools also that xcan help you verify emails and stuff if that is what you are looking for!