We all develop our own algorithms to validate email addresses. There must be an “@” sign in the string, there must be a period after that, etc. Most of these I have seen fail due to the domain name part of the email address. There are now Top Level Domains, TLD, (the letters that come after the “dot”) that are longer than three characters. I know of many non-IBM i applications that use a DNS lookup to determine if the domain is active, although this will not guarantee that the domain has email.
As part of the IBM i 7.5 and 7.4 TR6 release is a simple way to do a DNS lookup using SQL.
Before I get started I need to state the obvious: What I am going to show you here will only work if your IBM i partition can connect to the internet. If it cannot then you will be unable to duplicate what I describe here.
The DNS lookup is performed by a Db2 for i Table Function, DNS_LOOKUP, which is found in the library QSYS2. Two parameters can be passed to the Table function:
