I would like to know Is there any way to check that thee given email id is an active or not in python.
I have gone through 'validate_email' but it didn't give me the exact answer. It would be helpful if anyone help me out from this.
Take a look at: https://github.com/scottbrady91/Python-Email-Verification-Script. This may cover most cases. Trincot has a good point though. If an email never leaves an internal network there's no way to know.
Related
With the wake of the pandemic causing schools to go to distance learning, many classes take attendance by using a simple google form sent out to students to complete for each class everyday. While this seems like a simple solution, it is a pain for students to complete and keep track of. One way that I thought I could make this easier would be to keep track of which forms I have submitted everyday.
As of now, my problem is that I need a way to subscribe to the submit of a google form (based on a link). When that google form is submitted all I need to do is find a way to convey that to a program. What I do not understand is how I would be able to do that without having ownership of the form or make a teacher recreate the form. Is there a way that I can check if a google form has been submitted?
A couple of ideas I have had would be to sniff network traffic for a post request from a google form and get that link and compare it to other links in the program to see which one was submitted, but I would think there is an easier way to do this. Any ideas or code is welcomed.
I understand stack overflow is for already written code so if you do not agree with this post either ignore it or point me to the correct place where this should be posted. Thank you.
I am writing an online survey and I am wondering if there are any good techniques for allowing anonymous people to go to the survey and participate and also prevent duplicates.
I have considered the following, but there are drawbacks from each:
Use cookie in browser
Record IP address
Compare answers for similarities along with either/or the first two methods
Of the techniques I have considered, you either prevent multiple people from using the same device, or make it easy for a user to duplicate survey results. Hopefully someone has an excellent way to prevent this :)
Well I am not sure whether you are thinking of deliberate or accidental duplicates?
if you think people will want to post a load of results to skew the survey, I cannot add anything because any ID-related question you ask can be falsely answered.
if you want people to just give their answers without having to go through a login process, how about asking for their initials plus birthdate (ddmmyyyyfl)- that has a pretty good chance of being unique without really compromising their identities or taking too much time.
Was that what you were after?
Ed
I am currently investigating a similar scenario.
Some of the suggestions I found online are:
You generate a unique URL - which you can send to their email (this email does not have to be stored), and then you add a checksum to the URL to verify it is valid.
Similar to the above mentioned, you provide them with an uniquely generated password, and you validate whether the password has been used before.
The clear limitation is that you require their email, and this is slightly lengthy. However, the email address is not associated with the answer set.
Meaning, you can validate whether an email address has been used to send a URL/Password to. Prevents same email address from being used over and over.
Then when the URL/Password is used, you validate whether that unique reference has been used in an answer set before. (The answer set is associated with the Unique Reference, and not the person's email - ensuring anonymity).
The problem with using email, ID numbers, and Birth Date; is that all of these values can be fabricated.If this approach is used, also do not forget good old CAPTCHA, as a script can be created to run through the combinations and submit answer sets.
I realize this is an old post, but hopefully it helps someone at some point. All of the best.
What if I choose to use GMail's awesome mail archive search capabilities on my database? What if, for every transaction that my database is responsible, I emailed details of that transaction to a GMail address that exists for the sole purpose of searching and retrieving transactions.
Anyone logged into that account could search according to labels, invoice numbers, customer names - whatever using Google's search engine. The results are presented as 'email messages'.
Imagine a user working from the standard (web-based) GMail account searches for an invoice number via GMail's search box - he's returned all instances where the db did anything that included that unique number. Opening any of these 'email messages' would have the static text text included at the time of the transactions (historical and tracking gold) but could also carry a Gadget that could transform the 'message' into an editor so as to execute a new transaction on that invoice.
Imagine further that I wasn't the first one to think of this - cuz surely i'm not - and even if i were, i'm not smart enough to execute the idea alone.
Are you aware of efforts similar to this?
thx
[?belongs on superuser instead?]
An interesting idea, however given your search parameters it might be unreliable. Although gmail's search is great, I have found issues when searching for partial terms. Case in point, I had an email whose subject line was "stuffas". When I searched for "stuffa" I got no results, when I searched for "stuffas" I got the email in the search result. Additionally, I had an email with an 8 digit number inside the body. When I searched for 7 digits out of 8, I got no results, but when I put all 8 digits, the email appeared in the results. So, search in gmail may not be as powerful of a solution as you think. Again this is my experience, I'd love to hear if someone is able to partial search numbers in gmail.
I just had the same idea; 4 years after you. It still doesn't look like this has 'been done before' in any production sense. But now in 2014, I really don't see why not. Python packages for interfacing with gmail are already there and dead-simple to use. It does not take a whole lot of abstraction to turn this into a generalized key-value storage.
Its probably not exactly the fastest database, and not the best solution for everything; but as an easy-to-use, easy to search, trivial to configure, 100% uptime, cloud stored and backed up, free-as-in-beer database, its pretty epic as far as I can see.
Anyone else has seen examples of this having been done before?
Edit: having thought about it some more, there are several answers as to why this is a bad idea:
gmail does not permit random access from different locations; it will block you account. quite a showstopper
amazon simpleDB also gives you a simple key-value store with the same characteristics (plus good python support), and isn't THAT big of a pain to set up if you are willing to spend a day wrapping your head around it. And is also effectively free for the kind of traffic that youd be able to cram into a gmail account.
My reading of this article suggests that a benefit of ReCAPTCHA is that it can have humans verify words not recognised in the OCR/digitization of books. It does this by using these words in "Are you human?" tests. So ReCAPTCHA kills two birds with one stone. Great!
But I dont get it. If the word can't be recognised by the digitization process then what is the input entered, by the supposed human being, verified against? How does this work?
It shows two words. One of them the computer already knows, the other, it doesn't. It assumes that if you get the known one right, that you must know the other.
You don't know which of the two is already known so you, theoretically can't trick it. Additionally, it will replay a word with multiple people to get independent confirmation before sending it back to the source (newspaper company, book scanning group) as a valid answer.
But if a computer can't read such a
CAPTCHA, how does the system know the
correct answer to the puzzle? Here's
how: Each new word that cannot be read
correctly by OCR is given to a user in
conjunction with another word for
which the answer is already known. The
user is then asked to read both words.
If they solve the one for which the
answer is known, the system assumes
their answer is correct for the new
one. The system then gives the new
image to a number of other people to
determine, with higher confidence,
whether the original answer was
correct.
http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
Quoted from LEARN HOW reCAPTCHA WORKS
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
What is a best way to parse an email with bug description. One client decided recently that it would be nice for user to be able to send an email to known mailbox and a bug would be registered in bug tracker (not exactly bu close).
The problem is bug description has lot of fields like dates, times, descriptions, comments, losses, attachments etc. Relying on user to use some specific mail format is not the smartest thing to do.
The question is how could one parse email to get all needed information. The format should be not to strict, but enough to guess what fields mean what. I would also be interested to hear both correct and easiest solutions for this.
P.S.
Actually this feature was requested by a bank. They have a public mailbox where clients would sends discovered issues. The problem is to get as much information from these letters before bank employee will actually look at it.
We do something similar to this with RT, however the email isn't really parsed. All the emails go into a single queue where it is evaluated by our IT staff. Basically, the parsing is done by humans - they modify the ticket to have as much information as they can glean from the email.
You're unlikely to get users to adhere (correctly) to any special syntax or formatting you come up with - unless they are employees, highly trained, or have some incentive to follow your rules.
Another option would be to have the initial email respond with an email that is formatted as a questionaire. In other words, the user writes an initial bug report and immediately (or as soon as your email server can respond) gets back a "thank you - can you provide more info" message with prompts for more info. You could then parse that email and have it populate your bug tracking system with more accurate info,
Good luck! Sounds like a cool idea!
FogBugz has the ability to monitor an email address and add emails sent to that address as a new FogBugz cases.
There's also a feature called ScoutSubmit that accepts HTTP GET arguments and uses those to submit a new case. Very handy for having a application automatically submit bug reports from the field.
Categorizing a bug based on freeform text is a difficult proposition. Very little besides the defect submitter name and the date the bug is reported is easily gleened from an email. Is there a reason you are limiting yourself to email? If you provide a form to submit the bugs via a webpage you can categorize the defect/bug based on dropdown menu items you present to the user. In addition you can point them to common answers in a dynamic information portion of the page. Have a look at Apple iTunes support request page for a slightly annoying but effective method to force the user to give you decent information. Banking applications are not a good domain to allow ambiguity nor are they a good domain to have multiple rounds of communication.