How Important is Email Validation?

[eluser]Vik[/eluser]
How important is it to validate users' email addresses when they register? Is it effective in shutting out some spammers?

Thanks in advance to all for any info.

[eluser]Grahack[/eluser]
If you want an email address, you just want to be shure you get a valid email address, don't you?
Maybe I don't understand your question fully...

[eluser]ejangi[/eluser]
Yeah, I agree with Grahack... I don't think validating an email address is going to do anything about spammers, but as a programmer you want to be sure you have data integrity and you should never trust that the data coming into your system is correctly formatted.

[eluser]Developer13[/eluser]
Amen. Garbage in, garbage out. Basic data collection methods - never trust a user to enter correctly formatted data (just as the guy above me said)!