This is useful for example when you are about to sign up to an online service that requires your email to be validated by sending an email  message with a link for you to click to activate your account. If you spell your email address incorrectly the registration will fail, but you will not typically get any feedback that the email delivery failed.

With rjmailer it is possible to build an online service that tells the users if an email delivery failed right away in the web form that was used to register. Having this information can help the user to correct a spelling error or remove messages from a full inbox.

I released the initial public version of this piece of software back in april, but I haven't really had any time to start using it at work until now. This past week I spent a few hours modifying one of our projects, http://biblesearch.org, to use rjmailer when sending out account activation links and report back to the user if there was an issue sending out the mail. Feel free to try it out if you want, registering is free. Just fill out the form at the new user registration page.

While adding this feature I found a few small issues in rjmailer, so there is a new version available for download

rjmailer is a programming library that sends mail. There are some other pieces of software that does that, but they usually hand off their messages to the mail system and don't give much feedback to the user. rjmailer is not like that. It goes out of it's way to provide as much information as possible about the mail delivery and can in many cases give detailed and quick information about failures such as misspelled usernames or domain names.

Lets say you run a web based service that require people to register with some email address. You want to verify that the address is valid, so you send an email to the address that the user provided when signing up and require her to click a link in that message to activate your account. We're all used to this, but there are lots of things that can go wrong. The user can misspell her email address, or there can be some problem with her email server that causes the activation message to bounce. If you are unlucky you lose a member or even someone that can later be converted to a paying customer.

If that sounds interesting, please have a look at rjmailer.org. However, please be warned: this is beta software. It is not yet fully tested, has bugs and will probably lose your mail for the moment.