Fabricating Email Addresses

If you have customers who want to buy online from you but don’t have an email address, the solution is straightforward: as suggested in login as customer, you can simply create an email using their name. For example, if your customer’s name was Scott Wilson, you could create an account with the email scott.wilson@YOURDOMAIN.com.

There is just one problem: if the email address scott.wilson@YOURDOMAIN.com doesn’t exist, the email will bounce, and too many bounces will cause your hoster to complain and/or your deliverability to suffer.

There are a couple of solutions to this issue:

a) Depending on how your email is configured, your email server may have the option of a “catch all” email. Non-existent emails will be forwarded to this address and thus not bounce.

b) You can modify the Zen Cart software to not send to non-existent addresses. Here’s a sample implementation from Zen Cart 1.5.7:

In includes/functions/functions_email.php, right before the check of EMAIL_MODULES_TO_SKIP, i.e.

    if (defined('EMAIL_MODULES_TO_SKIP') && in_array($module,explode(",",constant('EMAIL_MODULES_TO_SKIP')))) return false;

add code that checks a defined constant containing valid addresses at your domain. Skip sending if the email has your domain name but is not in this list.

    $mail_parts = explode('@',strtolower($to_address)); 
    if ($mail_parts[1] == 'YOURDOMAIN.com') {
       $good_emails = explode(",", LIVE_EMAIL);
       if (empty($good_emails)) return; 
       for ($i = 0; $i < sizeof($good_emails); $i++) {
          $good_emails[$i] = trim($good_emails[$i]); 
          $good_emails[$i] = str_replace('@YOURDOMAIN.com','',$good_emails[$i]); 
       }
       if (in_array($mail_parts[0], $good_emails)) {
         // continue processing 
       } else {
          return true;  // pretend we have sent the email
       }
    }