<p>We are looking to improve our marketing email list by preventing fake emails from entering in the first place.  We want to confirm that an email address exists (and that there is actually a mailbox for that email address).  </p>

<p>Does anyone know of any services or components to validate an email address?  </p>

the following regular expression is an example of how you could validate an email address is in the correct general format:
```
```
(\w+@[a-zA-Z_]+?\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6})
```
```
For security reasons, very few email servers provide a function to remotely validate whether or not a mailbox exists, so it is very unlikely a service could provide this information with any reliability.
Hope this helps!
Adam