The Correct Way to Validate Email Addresses

Asking to retype though being a simple solution IMHO is asking for a lot. Consider a user who uses mobile phone, even copy paste is annoying. Validating if the mail box exists and that it does not belong to a provider like mailinator and then sending a confirmation link to them works. While its not perfect, it does address lot of other concerns without sacrificing user experience.

All of that statistical analysis was actually a bit silly, because I've never heard the "typo" argument as a reason for email grammar validation[1]. Sounds like a straw man. It didn't need to be disproven.

The conclusion is sound (although leaves out a discussion of the whether an email confirmation field is at least better than nothing).

[1]: (As a side note, I think the most common explanations for grammar validation are programmer perfectionism and proactively stopping user garbage, such as copy-paste errors or intentionally fluffed fields that will result in a bounced email anyway.)

You can use a regex as a simple pre-check but you absolutely have to do more than that if you expect high-quality results.

Back in the 90s, we ran the customer rewards program mailing list for a mainstream business you've heard of. A [gnarly] regex took care of the gross failures but we still had double-digit percentage of invalid addresses and many spam reports because people mistyped their username, used their old ISP's email address which had been disconnected, etc.

The only approach which produced satisfactory results back then was to have a bit of (horrible) PHP code which did a full SMTP connection to deliver the welcome email. Even that wasn't enough to ensure you'd delivered it to the right person, however, so we had to track clicks on an activation link.

I would be surprised if the average internet user has gotten significantly more reliable over the last couple of decades and that's born out by the wide variety of misdirected legitimate email my shortname@gmail.com account receives.

One thing I've found that helps a lot is instant delivery notifications. When you try to register a new account, our "We've sent a confirmation email" screen will report within a few seconds if there was a mail delivery error and allow the user to correct their address. Common typo detection for popular email domains is also beneficial (https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck)

Great article. Wrong. Question.

The better question: In it's current form, is an email addresses really the best way to do what it is that's trying to be accomplished? (Hint: It's a fax machine.)

I mean, if I have have a phone number, why can't I have an email number? Okay, perhaps not the greatest example. But then again, if a phone number can be switched from one carrier to another, in the second decade of the 21st century shouldn't "email" get the same consideration?

Instead we're talking about regex or some other wonky validation? In 2016? That's just silly.