Earlier quoted context omitted.
> at least one . after the @ will do for this technically not required... [adam@solomon]$ dig +noall +answer mx ai ai. 21572 IN MX 10 mail.offshore.ai.
I've read this more than once, and it basically always boils down to: "The only way to verify an email address is to send an email to it." In my opinion, the optimal validation is soft validation: "your email address doesn't look right, continue with it?"
And then hope the server's e-mail workflow can handle subaddressing because you entered in something like "username+service@gmail.com".
Seems like a lot of folks don't like '+', even though it's been part of the e-mail system since the 1980s.