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Check If Email Exists

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Re: Check If Email Exists

#161

Post by justinator »

cyberCleve wrote: post #126
maddyboo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just watched a video where someone demo’d GitHub Copilot by writing a comment along the lines of // IsValidEmail takes a string and returns whether it’s a valid email address The AI response was a nightmarish 100+ character regex that made my blood curdle. I think of email validation like encryption: don’t roll your own, and don’t trust an AI to do it either. Edit: Here's the regex: https://gist.github.com/cassidoo…

Does it work?

Yeah basically, but it doesn't validate an email address (user@example.com), it validates say, the From: header of a MIME message, which could contain an email address, a phrase (like a first and last name) comments, and all sorts of dumb dumb ideas like having phrases that have embedded comments and phrases that look like email addresses but aren't and on and on and on. This RFC is a trainwreck and whoever wrote it should feel bad about themselves.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#162

Post by cookie_monsta »

Cyberdog wrote: post #8

Could someone spell out a use case for this? One that comes to mind would be validating that a mailing list doesn't have any outdated email addresses in it, but couldn't that be determined by just checking for a bounce when a message is sent to it? I tried to sign up for SiriusXM the other day, and though I could create an account with my .pro email address, I couldn't actually sign up for service with that same addr…

> Please hire me, SiriusXM.

Honestly not where I thought that rant was heading ;)

Re: Check If Email Exists

#163

Post by justinator »

tyingq wrote: post #43
akcreek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use email validation via MailGun for exactly this purpose with a productized service business. If we don't have a good email, then we can't deliver the service once complete. That leads to angry customers, even if the issue was a typo when they created the account. Easier to try and catch it during signup rather than at the time of delivery when emails start bouncing and you have no way to get ahold of the person.

Mailcheck is also helpful to catch things like "user@gnail.com" and other common typos when the user types it in: https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck Fork modified for React: https://github.com/eligolding/react-mailcheck#readme

I somewhat lol'd when the demo allowed "user@gnail.com" just fine. Guess kickstarter isn't using mailcheck anymore. Looks like it's an open issue:

https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck/issues/179

Re: Check If Email Exists

#164

Post by slaymaker1907 »

maddyboo wrote: post #68
Cyberdog wrote: post #8

Could someone spell out a use case for this? One that comes to mind would be validating that a mailing list doesn't have any outdated email addresses in it, but couldn't that be determined by just checking for a bounce when a message is sent to it? I tried to sign up for SiriusXM the other day, and though I could create an account with my .pro email address, I couldn't actually sign up for service with that same addr…

I just watched a video where someone demo’d GitHub Copilot by writing a comment along the lines of // IsValidEmail takes a string and returns whether it’s a valid email address The AI response was a nightmarish 100+ character regex that made my blood curdle. I think of email validation like encryption: don’t roll your own, and don’t trust an AI to do it either. Edit: Here's the regex: https://gist.github.com/cassidoo…

This really seems like it is plagiarizing the regex from somewhere without citation.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#165

Post by makeitdouble »

tlogan wrote: post #86
bombcar wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re the same thing, really.

Not really: but majority of spammers think that they are doing marketing.

If you’re sending to someone who actively subscribed and wants to hear from you it’s not “marketing”, it’s information. Basically a newsletter.

Otherwise it’s spam.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#166

Post by moooo99 »

bkuehl wrote: post #119
profmonocle wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A non-marketing example: We were onboarding a large new client to our SAAS product. This process involved creating accounts for all of their employees (tens of thousands) and sending emails with an activation link. (Where they'd be able to set up their password.) Our system sends these emails in batches, and as soon as the first batch went out we got an alert from our monitoring system that our bounce rate was surgin…

I can't even imagine wanting to handle managing accounts and credentials for that many users at an enterprise! At that point SSO integration is well worth the money. How did you handle removing access when a user was no longer employed at the company?

Not OP, but also building a similar user system. I can totally understand the motivation to not use the internal SSO. With most companies I know, as soon as you actually connect to their private datasources, you have to do some extra steps to prove how you're securing your platform. This makes sense from the companies perspective, but also introduces a huge technical and organizational overhead for the startup which might be better spend elsewhere if your product does not absolutely rely on SSO

Re: Check If Email Exists

#167

Post by Extigy »

kstrauser wrote: post #33
Clewza313 wrote: post #2

> Has this email been compromised in a data breach? Eep. My email is listed half a dozen times in Have I Been Pwned records, but I use different passwords for every site, so this means nothing.

Here, let me simplify that code: def has_user_been_pwned(email): return True There. It's nearly impossible to be on the Internet at all without having some account or another be involved in an exploit at some point. You could rename the endpoint `user_had_a_facebook_or_twitter_or_linked_account_or_has_a_credit_score()`. This is a worthless thing to query because it tells you absolutely nothing about the owner of the…

I think it’s genius, but evil. Like you say, real email addresses have all been pwned so this is a way to test for bogus or typo’d email addresses.

What a way to ruin a wonderful thing! Abusing the haveibeenpawned service in this way has worried me enough that I’ve now gone and removed my data from the publicly searchable database. I’ll use the notification service instead.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#168

Post by indigo945 »

EnderWT wrote: post #151
killingtime74 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never worked with emails, could you not send these first emails yourself and not use SES

Have you looked into what SES or other email services provide? Sending emails is easy, while actually getting them delivered is harder. You have to make sure you're not getting flagged as spam, can handle bouncebacks, etc. Here's one discussion: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/371/how-do-you-make-sure...

Not getting flagged as spam isn't actually that hard, though. Besides, if you're using SES or some other hosted SMTP service, you still have to set up SPF for your domain, so you haven't even really gained much comfort. The only really useful thing is to gain an ip address with a high reputation, but you can generally get those at any reputable hosting provider as well. Just don't try sending emails from your residential internet connection.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#169

Post by friendzis »

profmonocle wrote: post #105
Cyberdog wrote: post #8

Could someone spell out a use case for this? One that comes to mind would be validating that a mailing list doesn't have any outdated email addresses in it, but couldn't that be determined by just checking for a bounce when a message is sent to it? I tried to sign up for SiriusXM the other day, and though I could create an account with my .pro email address, I couldn't actually sign up for service with that same addr…

A non-marketing example: We were onboarding a large new client to our SAAS product. This process involved creating accounts for all of their employees (tens of thousands) and sending emails with an activation link. (Where they'd be able to set up their password.) Our system sends these emails in batches, and as soon as the first batch went out we got an alert from our monitoring system that our bounce rate was surgin…

At that point would it not be easier to just spin up a VM in customer's infra and send emails directly to their exchange server?

Re: Check If Email Exists

#170

Post by maddyboo »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #164
maddyboo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just watched a video where someone demo’d GitHub Copilot by writing a comment along the lines of // IsValidEmail takes a string and returns whether it’s a valid email address The AI response was a nightmarish 100+ character regex that made my blood curdle. I think of email validation like encryption: don’t roll your own, and don’t trust an AI to do it either. Edit: Here's the regex: https://gist.github.com/cassidoo…

This really seems like it is plagiarizing the regex from somewhere without citation.

It looks like it:

https://twitter.com/xooorx/status/1410776673985994754

https://stackoverflow.com/a/38137215

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