It's Impossible to Validate an Email Address
elliot.land
It's Impossible to Validate an Email Address
1–10 of 68 posts
Re: It's Impossible to Validate an Email Address
#2I've been using Mailguns validator [0] for a while now and have been quite pleased. It catches common typos and validates DNS on the host name.
[0] https://documentation.mailgun.com/api-email-validation.html
Re: It's Impossible to Validate an Email Address
#3> One more interesting tidbit is if you use unique sub-addresses for each of the sites you sign up to you will be able to see when someone, or rather who, sells your email to someone else... Busted!
Can't the spammers simply strip the subaddress/label after '+' ?
Re: It's Impossible to Validate an Email Address
#4> One more interesting tidbit is if you use unique sub-addresses for each of the sites you sign up to you will be able to see when someone, or rather who, sells your email to someone else... Busted! Can't the spammers simply strip the subaddress/label after '+' ?
They can.
They don't.
It's extra effort for them for nearly zero marginal gain.
Re: It's Impossible to Validate an Email Address
#5Title on article would be more complete if said by Regex.
Re: It's Impossible to Validate an Email Address
#6I think that spaces are also valid in email addresses. So, even would be a valid email address in that case...
Re: It's Impossible to Validate an Email Address
#7> One more interesting tidbit is if you use unique sub-addresses for each of the sites you sign up to you will be able to see when someone, or rather who, sells your email to someone else... Busted! Can't the spammers simply strip the subaddress/label after '+' ?
It doesn't have to be +. It can be any character you configure. Recent postfix versions even supports multiple characters.
Re: It's Impossible to Validate an Email Address
#8Title on article would be more complete if said by Regex.
That's what the article describes, but it's hard to validate an email address by sending to it too if you want time bounds. My mail server implements greylisting and its frequently difficult for me to verify my email address on services that send me tokens that expire. Greylisting typically delays by only 10 minutes or so but there are plenty of times that mail servers can be down for extended periods, or a quota/disc is full, or an intermediate mail router is down, or any number of other problems
Re: It's Impossible to Validate an Email Address
#9> One more interesting tidbit is if you use unique sub-addresses for each of the sites you sign up to you will be able to see when someone, or rather who, sells your email to someone else... Busted! Can't the spammers simply strip the subaddress/label after '+' ?
I went a step further and bought a .com that I setup with a catchall email forwarder. Most signups get a custom email at that domain. I still get Russian bride emails sent to oilchangeplace@
Re: It's Impossible to Validate an Email Address
#10With a regex/parser maybe -- but it's very easy to require "activation" from said email address as a verification.