I had to send out an email newsletter at work today. A newsletter that had to be sent to thousands of email addresses, many of which were dead. How do I know this? Because Thunderbird wouldn’t let me send the newsletter until I fixed my mail list. Unfortunately this mailing list has thousands of email addresses and I wasn’t about to sift through them manually.
After doing some searching, I found an addon for Thunderbird 2 called Thunderplunger, that lets you validate single addresses and full address books by simply right clicking them and choosing the validate option. Unfortunately I have Thunderbird 3.0.4 on this machine, so I ended up installing Thunderbird 2 in an Ubuntu virtual machine I had running. After installing the addon I ran the validation and after a few hours I got a list of email addresses to remove from my mailing list. It even gives you notes on what happened when trying to validate, for example “Domain does not exist” etc. I assume that the time it takes to complete depends on the number of addresses you have to validate, so times may vary.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, do give it a try!
