Commands useful for cleaning up a list of email addresses



Did you trim the leading and trailing space?
   sed -e 's/^ *//' -e 's/ *$//' rawfile > cookedfile

Did you try grepping for missing '@' signs?
   grep -v @ listfile

How about spaces, quotes, commas, angles...?
   grep '[ "<>;,/!#%&()=|\\`~]' listfile

How about questionable or missing TLDs?
   egrep -v '\.(com|edu|net|org|ca|us)$' listfile

How about domain names that don't resolve?

   cut -f2 -d@ lisfile | while read address
   do
       if host "$address" > /tmp/foo 2>&1
       then
          echo $address >> gooddomains
       else
          cat /tmp/foo
       fi
   done | tee bogosity.log