There are times when you will receive an email from someone you were not anticipating communications from and then jump out of your seat because you received a good news. However, it could be that someone is playing a prank with you and the email address for that user might not even exist.

Of course there are ways to determine whether an email is fake or not by looking at the email headers, but what if you want to verify whether an email address exists or not? Turns out there is a way to do it, albeit a bit geeky.

Amit Agarwal has posted an interesting post where he details determining whether or not an email address exists using a clever trick with telnet. The trick requires you to connect to an email server using telnet and then pinging to see if that email address exists.

If you are interested in knowing more, go ahead and visit the post by Amit at Digital Inspiration. For a quick how-to check out the embedded video below.

Please note that this may not work always as email servers block such queries so that spammers cannot fish legitimate email addresses from their databases.