Steve Nelson

Mark;

First let me say how thrilled (overwhelmed is more like it)  I was to find
you site (followed a link from the brothercake udm4 site). I was seriously
considering udm4 for a indexing spider friendly, gracefully degrading,
vertical expanding navigation menu for a site re-design for the church I
attend. However,  udm4, impressive though it is, really seemed like massive
overkill for my modest needs. Your css/javascript example appears perfect.
Immense gratitude for that.

So that's what brought me to your site. But once there I immediately noticed
your PHP e-mail validating script. I wrote a tutorial for how to create a
Flash contact form:
[URL]

When I wrote it, I referenced another writer's tutorial on using PHP to talk
directly to an MX server as part of the validation process. After a while I
began to get e-mail from people who were getting "invalid" responses from
valid e-mails. I am NOT a PHP wizard not do I know anything at all about
conversing with mail servers. When the older script was found to be faulty
(I have assumed that this is due to security protocols put into place after
that tutorial was written??) all I could do was to advise people to stick
with a regex check and leave it at that.

And then I found yours. Played with it a bit and AOL seemed to respond okay
(one of the problems with the previous script I used), as did several (well,
what I as an American would call "foreign") domain suffixes and I got all
excited that maybe I could utilize your validating script in place of the
old one.

I would have to make some small modifications to your script however, and
that is why I am writing. The earlier validation script returned three
possible responses:
"passed" if all was okay
"error" if the address seems okay but some server error was encountered
"invalid" if the address does not appear to be okay

The Flash movie is set to get one of these three responses back and go to
one of three frames based on the script response.

Would it be possible to obtain permission to modify your validation script
to do this? At least to return "passed" and "invalid"? I'm not asking you to
do it (but I admit I might need some help - I only scored a 36% geekiness
factor on your questionnaire scoring demo), just asking if it's okay.

I have no problems giving you lavish credit - nearly every tutorial I have
written references the work of others and I ALWAYS credit the work of
others.

Thanks a MILLION for the fantastic information you have available on your
site, and for your attention to this question.

Regards,

Steve

> You are welcome to make any modifications to my scripts that you want.

Thank you for getting back to me. I have several things on my late just now,
so it will be some time before I can turn my attention to this, but I am so
grateful to hear from you. I will keep your requirements (comments, current
code) in the front of my mind.

Thanks SO much.

Steve