verifying email addresses is tricky
the first part is easy enough, to validate it looks like a valid email address. there's plenty of such validation schemes using regular expressions... do a google on "php email validation"
verifying that the address is valid usually requires sending an email to that address and request the user authenticates themselves. usually you would include a URL to a script on your site with a unique reference embedded in the URL.
you can assume the email address isn't verified if it gets bounced back to you, but that could take days in some cases. same email servers are a bit more active and you could find out in a matter of minutes. however the only certain way to verify ius to send an email with authentication URL
the URL could be
http://URL.to.my.site/authentication...87436cbd9o1019
where
authenticationscript.php is the name of the authentication script
the hashcode is the name of the variable you want to process in the script
oi7y87436cbd9o1019 is the value for that variable.
I'd suggest the hashcode is some form of encrypted message which uniquely identifies who the user is using somehting like the
mcrypt class.
your encryption message should include padding characters so that a malicious user would struggle to break your key if they tried to register the site.
I'd suggest a not only the bit that uniquely identifies the user but also something else. that something else could be some free form text
$key = "insert your key here";
$text = "Authenicate user:".$userid;
$encrypted_data = mcrypt_ecb (MCRYPT_3DES, $key, $text, MCRYPT_ENCRYPT);
other padding text could include dates+times,even some gibberish (makeup some letters to pad before and after the userid.)
use a comma, or other punctuation symbols that you know will not be in the userid in the string to delimit the sections you want to extract