Helping users to enter their correct email address?

Adding more error checking, anyone do this?

[limitup]

We offer a free service and get 1000s of signups per day. Obviously lots and lots of people are signing up with hotmail, aol, yahoo, comcast, etc. email addresses.

One thing we've started doing on signup is not only checking for valid email format, but also checking and fixing common typos. For example, if someone enters [e-mail] we automatically correct it to [e-mail]. Same goes for hormail.com, hotmai.com, yhaoo.com, yaho.com, etc. We get tons of these.

We're also "correcting" other mistakes such as converting hotmail.net to hotmail.com. yahoo.net to yahoo.com, etc.

What I'm wondering is if anyone is currently doing this, and if there are any "common email typos" lists out there?

For example, other common ones are @msn.com, @msn.net, and @comcast.com. As I understand it, MSN doesn't give email addresses at either msn.com or msn.net, right? So these aren't valid email addresses. And anyone using comcast as an ISP would have a comcast.net address, not comcast.com right, so we can automatically convert comcast.com to comcast.net. Can anyone confirm these?

I think these are the other really common ones, but we're trying to build as big a list as possible. The obvious benefits are less bounced emails and more users receiving our emails.

[Rodney]

I do have customers that have an @msn.com email address.

I think you get it if you signup with msn as your ISP.

[supermanjnk]

comcast emails are [e-mail]
msn would be [e-mail]

[GeorgeK]

It might be easier to have them enter their email twice, and testing that those 2 input fields are the same, rather than develop a more complex algorithm.

[limitup]

You would think - but we already do that. LOL

[krieves]

We get lots of bad addresses where people make typos and use commas instead of periods. For instance jdoe@hotmail,com.

[Rodney]

we also get lots of people that put www in front of their email username.

I think they are so used to typing in domain names, they automatically start out with www.

Example entry: [e-mail]

when the actual email username is [e-mail]

Bonus for who can spot the pop culture reference :)

[Reflection]

It's not a problem, but I always wonder about the people who type in their address in all caps.

[bird]

Checking for an MX DNS record will catch quite a few typos, especially if the target domain isn't quite as popular as your examples. The two methods complement each other very nicely because of that.