this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Programming

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (15 children)

By the way, please don’t write regex to try to validate email addresses. Seriously.

Amen.

There are libraries for that; some of them are even good.

Spoiler alert: Few of them are good, and those few are so simple that you might as well not use a library.

The only way to correctly validate an email address is to send a message to it, and verify that it arrived.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago (11 children)

You can use a regex to do basic validation. That regex is .+@.+. Anything beyond that is a waste of time.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 9 months ago (6 children)

There are also cases where you want to have a disallow list of known bad email providers. That’s also part of the parsing and validating.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

disallow list of known bad email providers.

Imagine giving someone your phone number, and having them say you have to get a different one because they don't like some of the digits in it.

I have seen this nonsense more times than I care to remember. Please don't build systems this way.

If you're trying to do bot detection or the like, use a different approach. Blacklisting email addresses based on domain or any other pattern does a poor job of it and creates an awful user experience.

(And if it prevents people from using spam-fighting tools like forwarding services, then it's directly user-hostile, and makes the world a worse place.)

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