How to ping server before sending mail with smtp

[dbasnett]

Yeah but as he mentioned a VPN it seems likely that this is an internal mail server and he already knows it responds to pings

In my opinion it is a huge waste of bandwidth, and even if the ping is successful you still have to catch exceptions. Consider this:

1 - Successful ping
2 - Start sending email
3 - Network goes down
4 - email fails

or

1 - Network down
2 - Ping fails
3 - Network comes back up
4 - Cancel sending because ping failed

A (un)successful ping is only that, nothing more.