I also reached out to them on Twitter but they directed me to this form. I followed up with them on Twitter with what happened in this screenshot but they are now ignoring me.
When you insist on implementing your own email address validation…
I have my own domain that uses a specific 2-letter ccTLD - it’s a short domain variation of my surname (think “goo.gl” for Google). I’ve been using it for years, for my email.
Over those years, I have discovered an astonishing number of fuckheaded organisations whose systems insist I should have an email address with a “traditional” TLD at the end.
A few years back I bought a .family domain for my wife and I to have emails at ourlastname.family That lasted a week because almost every online service wouldn’t accept it. Now we have a .org
Doesn’t surprise me one bit. I’ve noticed that a lot of websites will only accept .com and a few will only accept email addresses from popular providers (Gmail, Hotmail, outlook, etc.)
My guess is that it’s trying to reduce spam and fake account generation.
I went with .io specifically for this. It doesn’t look special or anything, it’s just cheaper than .org and accepted anywhere I’ve tried, so far.
My first email address was @k.ro (a free email provider many many years ago) and many websites thought a valid second-level domain name cannot be just one letter
Same. There are a lot of sites that just outright refuse to accept my email address that I’ve had for years, because it’s not a .com TLD.
CVS and E*Trade both refused to accept my fairly standard user@mydomain.info address during initial registration, but had no issue changing to that address once the account was created. It would be nice if their internal teams communicated a bit better.
The only useful email validation is “can I get an MX from that” and “does it understand what I’m saying in that SMTP”. Anything else is someone that have too much free time.
It’s easier to Google “email regex [language]” and copy the first result from stack overflow.
Definitely a timesaver. Much faster to get incorrect email validation that way then to try building it yourself.
I’ve encountered this because my domain has a hyphen in it. Very irritating.
I’m not aware of any correct email validations. I’m still looking for something accepting a space in the localpart.
Also a surprising number of sites mess with the casing of the localpart. Don’t do that - many mailservers do accept arbitrary case, but not all. MyName@example.com and myname@example.com are two different mail addresses, which may point to the same mailbox if you are lucky.
The only correct regex for email is: .+
So long as the address has a local part, the at sign, and a hostname, it’s a valid email address.
Whether it goes somewhere is the tricky part.
Sorry, this is not a correct regex for an email address.
Sending using mail on a local unix system? You only need the local part.
STOP VALIDATING NAMES AND EMAIL ADDRESSES. Send a verification email. Full stop. Don’t do anything else. You really want to do this anyway, because it’s a defense against bots.
You should be able to double quote the local part and use the space. "like this"@email.net. Good luck getting that through a validator though.
but they are now ignoring me.
Hmm. Did you try giving them your email address?
Somebody made a shitty regex.
Probably, from what I can see the address in question isn’t really that exotic. but an email regex that validates 100% correctly is near impossible. And then you still don’t know if the email address actually exists.
I’d just take the user at their word and send an email with an activation link to the address that was supplied. If the address is invalid, the mail won’t get delivered. No harm done.
Actually, one of our customers found out the hard way that there is harm in sending emails to invalid addresses. Too many kickbacks and cloud services think you’re a bot. Prevented the customer from being able to send emails for 24 hours.
This is the result of them “requiring” an email for customers but entering a fake one if they didn’t want to provide their email, and then trying to send out an email to everyone.
Our software has an option to disable that requirement but they didn’t want to use it because they wanted their staff to remember to ask for an email address. It was not a great setup but they only had themselves to blame.
My guess is that would also occur with valid but non-existing e-mail addresses no? The regex would not be a remedy there anyway.
Of course you should only use the supplied e-mail address for things like mass mailings once it has been verified (i.e. the activation link from within the mail was clicked)
The best of validation is just to confirm that the email contains a and a . and if it does send it an email with a confirmation link.
TLDs are valid in emails, as are IP V6 addresses, so checking for a . is technically not correct. For example a@b and a@[IPv6:2001:db8::1] are both valid email addresses.
Email standard sucks anyway. By the official standard, User@email.com and user@email.com should be treated as separate users…
Personally I don’t think that sucks or is even wrong. Case-independent text processing is more cumbersome. ‘U’ and ‘u’ are two different symbols. And you have to make such rules for every language a part of your processing logic.
If people can take case-dependence for passwords (or official letters and their school papers), then it’s also fine for email addresses.
The actual problem is cultural, coming from DOS and Windows where many things are case-independent. It’s an acquired taste.
We’re gonna need a bigger regex
TLDs could theoretically have MX records too! Email addresses as specified also support IPv6 addresses! The regex would need to be .+ and at this point it’s probably easier to just send an email.
That’s what it looks like to me too
I could probably write a RegEx for email format validation that’s accurate, but why would I when there are ones already written and readily available that covers all possible legit variations on the standard? I never understood why people insist on writing their own (crap) RegEx for something with as many possible variations they can miss like email…
And that one isn’t even a weird edge case! It’s a domain with a sub domain, if they can’t even cover that case then it’s an extra shitty RegEx
Let’s see your regex pattern that covers every possible valid email address and rejects all invalid then. It’s not remotely as easy as you’re making it out to be.
Not saying this isn’t a shitty pattern, but you can’t make a claim like that.
What claim, that I probably could? I didn’t say anything at all about it being easy, it would be a pain in the ass and involve a lot of checking the RFC, but I could probably make one that accurately represents the spec if I wanted to take the time, and even then I’m not exactly confident I would hit every edge case.
But why would I go to that hassle when there are well designed and vetted ones available?
I believe you missed the point I was making
And that one isn’t even a weird edge case! It’s a domain with a sub domain, if they can’t even cover that case then it’s an extra shitty RegEx
Like my work email which is “my.name@umbrellacompany.company.com”
Smells like bad regex
Exactly. After the @ they should just confirm there’s at least one period. The rest is pretty much up in the air.
Even that would be technically incorrect. I believe you could put an A record on a TLD if you wanted. In theory, my email could be me@example.
Another hole to poke in the single dot regex: I could put in fake@com. with a dot trailing after the TLD, which would satisfy “dot after @” but is not an address to my knowledge.
Something something http://[2607:f8b0:4004:c09::8a] and http://3627734062 are valid url’s without a dot, and are probably valid for emails too, but I’m too lazy to actually verify that.
The best way to validate an email address is to sent it an email validation link.
Anything outside of that is a waste of effort.
That is 100% a chatbot using a regex email validator someone wrote as a meme that the chipotle dev copied from stack overflow without context.
One of the reasons I’ve always avoided .info, nobody seems to believe it’s a real domain
