Monthly Archives: August 2008

Color blindness and accessibility

Computing, English, Internet
Color Pencils

Bild von Monfocus auf Pixabay

In an effort to meet accessibility requirements, I was looking for tools to check whether users with a variety of color blindness conditions can actually use our websites. Posters and brochures can already be difficult to read for color blind people. On web sites another dimension is added to this problem because certain features may be rendered useless by choosing a bad color palette. Colored links for example, if not underlined, may not be seen as links because they appear to be of the same color as all other text. Continue reading →

Email Address Validation Tool

Computing
I have been doing do a lot of email marketing lately. Our email marketing service does a pretty good job at removing records with an invalid email address from the imported data set. However, some invalid addresses still slip through and cause unnecessary bounces and license costs. We therefore need to correct or remove all invalid addresses before we import them. Some can be easily corrected without involving the subscriber, like

someone@hotmail
someone @ yahoo.com
someone@gmail.cmo

Others can be removed from the subscriber list because they originate from fake subscriptions, like test@justtesting.

I was looking for an online tool to clean up an email address list but could only find tools that process one address at a time. So I read RFC 3696 to learn more about valid email address formats and wrote my own. The tool does email format checks for most of the RFC requirements. It also queries the email domain’s DNS server to look for MX and A records.

UPDATE Feb 13, 2006: The email address validation tool on this page is no longer supported.


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