Verifying Email Addresses the new way!

				

Today, two of the biggest assets a portal has are its users and the data about them. As the database grows, its important that the 
information being collected is accurate or else it would be worthless. While there are many things like the name, age or profession of a user 
which a site cannot verify without using a third-part solution, there is the e-mail address of users which can and must be verified. Today, 
more than 75% of portals verify e-mail addresses. Website do this in many diffrent ways. The methods range from sending activation code to 
links on the e-mail address and wait till the user, in one way or another, "responds" to the mail. In this article today, I will discuss one 
of the newly introduced methods which does not require the member to do anything except open the welcome letter when he/she 
signup.


The technique used in this article has several advantages:


 No activation code for user to enter or URLs for user to click on in the e-mail message
 In someways, more secure than other solutions as the user does not find out anything about whats going on in the background when the 
welcome message loads.



I can hear you saying "whatever... lets move on"... well I cannot agree with you anymore!







How Its Done






The way we verify the e-mail address of the user in this example is very interesting. When we send the user the welcome letter to their 
e-mail address they provided us with, we will imbed in that e-mail message an image. When we specify the image in our message, we will use 
an HTML < IMG> like shown below:



	

	

	

	
	
	< img src="http://www.bakery.biz/activate.asp?aCode=1234" >
	
	
	


When the user opens the welcome message, the request for the image will be sent to activate.asp  along with the querystring data. When 
the request comes to activate.asp,it can then do the database processing and send the image. 


The following illustration may help you better understand the whole concept.






Application Structure




This application will consist of four total files including the database. Following are their names along with a brief description.



 RegisterForm.asp- This will have the registration form used to signup.
 Register_action.asp- This file will contain insert the data passed from RegisterForm.asp into the database(DB.mdb).
 Activate.asp- Activate.asp will do the dirty work of activating the user's account when the user opens the welcome letter.
 DB.mdb- This will hold the registration information of users.




DB.MDB



DB.MDB is going to be where the registration data will be stored. The database itself contains 6 fields(as shown below).







You can see the IsEmailVerified field above. That is how we will keep track of whether the registrar's 
account has been activated or not(with yes being activated and no being not activated).





RegisterForm.asp



We can quickly go through RegisterForm.asp as it is nothing more than the file which contains the HTML form for signup. I wont go through the 
whole HTML code as its pretty self-explanatory. But, to give you the idea, below is the screenshot of RegisterForm.asp.







Register_action.asp



Register_action.asp contains the ASP code which adds the user's input from Register_Form.asp into the databse. This file also contains the code which sends the welcome letter to the user on the 
email address the user provides. Below is the complete source code of this file. 

NOTE:This application uses ASP email to send 
the welcome mail. If you have some other component, you will have to make the respected changes into Register_action.asp.






<%

    'Connection string

    strConnect="Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source="& Server.MapPath("DB.mdb")&";"

    

    'Define the variable

    Dim objSignup

    

    'Create a Recordset object

    Set objSignup = Server.CreateObject("Adodb.Recordset") 

    

    'Open tbl_Users

    objSignup.Open "SELECT * FROM tbl_Users",strConnect,3, 3 '3=adOpenStatic,adLockOptimistic

    

    'Add a new entry into tbl_Users

    objSignup.AddNew 

    objSignup("Username")=Request.Form("Username")

    objSignup("Password")=Request.Form("Password")

    objSignup("Name")=Request.Form("Name")

    objSignup("Email")=Request.Form("Email")

    

    'Save the record and close objSignup(the recordset)

    objSignup.Update 

    

    'We will make the userID our activation code. 

    'We have to save the activation code into a variable so that we can access it later

    

    activationCode = objSignup("UserID")

    objSignup.Close 

    'Remove objSignup from the memory

    Set objSignup = Nothing

    

    'Now lets send the welcome mail to the user

    strMailContent="<HTML><BODY>"

    strMailContent=strMailContent & "<img 
src='http://127.0.0.1/EmailChecking/activate.asp?ActivationCode=" & activationCode & "'>"

    strMailContent=strMailContent & "<BR><BR><font size=2 face='Verdana'>Hello!<BR><BR>"

    strMailContent=strMailContent & "You have successfully 
become a member of bakery.biz! You can now enjoy many benefits. Just logon to bakery.biz and let the fun begin."

    strMailContent=strMailContent & "<BR><BR>Thanks,<BR><BR>The Bakery.Biz Team</HTML></BODY>"

 

    SendMail "Zaid","zaid@designMD.com",strMailContent,Request.Form("email"),"Welcome to 
bakery.biz!"

    

            Function SendMail 
(FromName,FromEmail,MailContent,MailingAddress,Subject)



            Set Mail = Server.CreateObject("Persits.MailSender")

            Mail.Host = "smtp.amexol.net" ' Specify a valid SMTP server

             

            Mail.From = FromEmail ' Specify sender's address

            Mail.FromName = FromName ' Specify sender's name

            Mail.AddBcc MailingAddress

             Mail.Subject = subject

            Mail.Body = MailContent



            'On Error Resume Next

            'Mail.Send

            'If Err <> 0 Then

            'Response.Write "Error encountered: 
" & Err.Description

            'End If

            mail.IsHTML = True



            mail.Send 

            End Function



%> 

<font face="Verdana" size="2">

Congratulations! You have successfully signed-up! A welcome mail has been sent to the e-mail address you provided. In order to successfully 
activate you account, you <b>must</b> read the welcome mail we sent. Thank you.

 



 



The code above is self-explanatory for most of the part. However, there are some key pieces of code that cannot be ignored. 


The code starts out by initiating a recordset object called objSignup. We use this object to write the 
user's info in the database. Note that before we close this object, we save the user's userid into a variable called activationCode. You will see why we do this in the next paragraph. 

Once the user's userinfo is saved into the 
database, we have to send the confirmation/welcome e-mail. The content of the email to be sent is stored in the strMailContent variable. The most important part of the e-mail is the < img 
src tag part of the mail shown below: (Notice that here is where we make use of the activationCode variable we saved 
earlier in the file.)



NOTEFor those of you who have read my previous article titled "Sending emails from asp by 
reading them from text files", you might be wondering why I chose to embed the mail directly into the ASP file rather than use the 
technique I described in my last submission. Well to answer your question, I did that to keep things simple as people who have not read my 
previous article can get confused for something not required.





strMailContent=strMailContent & "<img src='http://127.0.0.1/EmailChecking/activate.asp?ActivationCode=" & activationCode & "'>"





If you are not familiar, you will probably freak out after looking at the src attribute of the img tag above. But this is the most exciting 
part of all. When the e-mail message is sent and is retreived by the user, the mail server goes to this ASP page to retreive the image. As 
you may/may not know, ASP pages can be made to output JPG/GIF files to the client. And this is what we will discuss next!


Activate.asp


This is the file which the browser will go to in order to retreive the image in the email. Take a look at the source code.






<%
 Response.ContentType = "image/gif"
<--METADATA TYPE="typelib"
 
UUID="00000205-0000-0010-8000-00AA006D2EA4"
 
NAME="ADODB Type Library"



'Connection string

	strConnect="Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source="& Server.MapPath("DB.mdb")&";"
	


	'SQL Query which activates the account in the database (sets IsEmailVerified field to True

	SQL = "UPDATE tbl_Users SET tbl_Users.IsEmailVerified = True WHERE tbl_Users.UserID=" & Request.QueryString("ActivationCode")



	'Define the variable

	Dim objActivate
	


'Create a Recordset object

	Set objActivate = Server.CreateObject("Adodb.Recordset") 

	objActivate.Open SQL,strConnect


SendPicture



Function SendPicture



 'Create a stream object

 Dim objGetFile

 Set objGetFile = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Stream")
 



 'Open a GIF file
 objGetFile.Type = adTypeBinary

 objGetFile.Open

 objGetFile.LoadFromFile "c:/inetpub/wwwroot/EmailChecking/welcome.gif"

 
 'Output the contents of the stream object

 Response.BinaryWrite objGetFile.Read


 
 'Clean up....

 objGetFile.Close

 Set objGetFile = Nothing


 End Function
%>




This is the most important part of the application. This code starts out by telling the browser that the output will be sent in GIF form. 
Next, we have to load the ADODB constants. 


After defining the output type and loading the constants, we are ready to activate the user's account into the database. We do this by 
running an update SQL query as shown below. The query requests the activationCode and sets the IsEmailVerified field to true into the db.










'Connection string

strConnect="Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source="& Server.MapPath("DB.mdb")&";" 



'SQL Query which activates the account in the database (sets IsEmailVerified field to True

SQL = "UPDATE tbl_Users SET tbl_Users.IsEmailVerified = True WHERE tbl_Users.UserID=" & Request.QueryString("ActivationCode")


'Define the variable

Dim objActivate 


'Create a Recordset object

Set objActivate = Server.CreateObject("Adodb.Recordset")
 
objActivate.Open SQL,strConnect 





Once we have updated the account into the database, we still have to send the output. To keep things clear, I seperated the 
updating part of the code and the output part of the code by creating a function called SendPicture. SendPicture function sends a picture 
called welcome.gif back to the browser. And thats it... enjoy and dont forget to vote!

Dont forget to contact me at zaid@designMD.com 
or leave comments below if you have any questions about this or any other submission of mine.



Setting Up The Application


This sample can be setup by following the direction below:



1. Download and unzip the file.

2. Move the folder named EmailChecking into wwwroot.

3. Run http://127.0.0.1/EmailChecking/registerform.asp




Other Submissions of mine!

Sending emails from asp by reading them 
from text files 


Trim HTML from an ASP String 
(exceptions to certain HTML tags can be made)