Robert, Thanks for the advice (and describing my situation almost perfectly) :). I will certainly heed your advice, and I found a good piece of work by a fellow named Nirosh that I would recommend to others in the same situation. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/architecture/OOP\_Concepts\_and\_manymore.aspx?msg=2566566#xx2566566xx Thanks again, Nick K

Not sure what you are asking. There is a VRFY command within the SMTP protocol. Most servers have it turned off, because it is generally considered a security risk to allow email address verification. If it is a trusted server, it might work. Try "telnet yourservernameorIP 25" and type in "vrfy whomever@whatever.com" to see if a server supports it. http://www.the-welters.com/professional/smtp.html

I know I will probably get beat up about this, but coming from a procedural background, my OOP just sucks :). My coding is reasonably effective, but I am missing the code reuse part of OOP, and the way to facilitate that. Are there any good axioms, or tutorials on how to build applications properly with multiple classes (when they should be static, when not), when to create another class and when to stuff everything in one class, or when to inherit? The Gang of Four book is a little over my head, and perhaps a bit abstract (yuk,yuk) for me. I just glazed over after about an hour of trying to understand what was going on. I have recently been working on a windows application, and have gotten in a little deep, and since I am not being paid a king's ransom and not under the gun to finish it right away and I would just like to write something on which I could build later.