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Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex

davidcel.is

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Re: Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex

#71

Post by scoot »

twistedpair wrote: post #47

Amen! Anyone else here use myemail+token@gmail.com when they have to register with their email to find out who is selling them out and to make spam filters easier? It still amazes me that 70% of the places I attempt using foo+bar@gmail.com call it invalid. And that does not even begin to touch the myriad valid permutations that are "invalid" out there.

I use 33mail.com for the same purpose - it gives you a unique wildcard subdomain (and also a shortened domain (.33m.co) so you can create uinque addresses per signup etc, without the problems of + being rejected (or gicing away your real email address)

You can then block any address with a click if it's being abused.

If you're feeling generous, enough people using this link will earn me premium features: http://www.33mail.com/rj37w3

Re: Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex

#72

Post by MarkHarmon »

I'm against all of the complex regex as well, having learned through trial and error that it is usually way more trouble than it's worth. That being said, there are many cases where the email address being verified is not the user's email, but maybe someone they are doing business with, and they don't want the system sending a verification email to every email address they are saving with your software.

Re: Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex

#73

Post by salimmadjd »

I wish OP had provided some actual A/B registration fall-off data. For me client-side validation is more for catching user error than to do any actual "validation". That's always been the job of confirmation email.

I think there is going to be a very low percentage of users who will register again if they don't receive a confirmation email, unless you're giving away free iPhones. Granted regex can not catch most of the user-generated errors, but it can catch a few which could still increase you registered users.

To that point a better UI/UX (font size, spacing, etc.) might do a better job in lowering typos in email.

Re: Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex

#74

Post by jiggy2011 »

ScottWhigham wrote: post #48
jiggy2011 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are far far more likely to get their email address wrong by misspelling their own name or putting @hotmail.com when they meant to put @gmail.com; regex will not protect you from either of these things. We actually had an email list of ~50k people that had been validated within nothing other than "check there are at least 3 characters in the string" and when we looked at which addresses were bouncing when we se…

Spam bots, if there was no check in place to slow them down, would dwarf real people registrations in all systems always. So let's not confuse these two topics - they are different. One part of a system that allows users to register needs to ensure that you have an identifier for a customer and a way to contact that customer, and other techniques try to ensure that you aren't allowing the spammers in the door. Whethe…

That's true, but I would posit that you need a registration email anyway (assuming you even care if the email is valid) because even if your regex is perfect there's no way to detect people simply mistyping their email address in a way that is technically valid.

This is going to your dominant type of failure.

Re: Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex

#75

Post by davidcelis »

salimmadjd wrote: post #73

I wish OP had provided some actual A/B registration fall-off data. For me client-side validation is more for catching user error than to do any actual "validation". That's always been the job of confirmation email. I think there is going to be a very low percentage of users who will register again if they don't receive a confirmation email, unless you're giving away free iPhones. Granted regex can not catch most of t…

I wish I'd done that too, in retrospect. I could obviously have done much more research around my opinions, and there's one use-case in which what I'm advocating simply does not work: when you are _paying_ to send those emails. In that case, yeah, you're gonna wanna do some validation.

Re: Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex

#76

Post by jerf »

benguild wrote: post #64
smackfu wrote: post #34

The question is why people are validating the email in the first place. * to ensure it is deliverable? Well, then you better send them an email. * to let people know when they misread the labels and put something that was clearly not an email in the email field? A simple check for an at-sign is usually sufficient. * because some tester opens a ticket saying you can enter an invalid email in the email field? Yeah, tha…

Because it takes system resources to deliver email. Furthermore, if people make a simple typo, why go to the extent of attempting to send something to it when it's obvious?

Because it's not obvious. Ask developers to recite the rules for correct email address, and most of them will get it laughably wrong. I blame the standard, which is far more "featureful" than is actually required, but that is the way it is.

Re: Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex

#78

Post by Kequc »

Kequc wrote: post #69
Kiro wrote: post #29

I don't validate emails at all. If you want to enter 'a' that's fine but you won't get any emails.

I'm the same. An email address isn't an identity. Some people use many email addresses and so could create many accounts. With one email address they can still use the '+blahblah' method to sign up unlimited times, unless you prevent that which would annoy people who use it legitimately for filtering. Some people have a garbage or throwaway email account that they sign up for everything with, and only ever look at to…

If you own any domain you can forward @yourdomain.com to the same inbox. Then sign up for unlimited accounts that way.´

Re: Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex

#79

Post by bane »

smackfu wrote: post #34

The question is why people are validating the email in the first place. * to ensure it is deliverable? Well, then you better send them an email. * to let people know when they misread the labels and put something that was clearly not an email in the email field? A simple check for an at-sign is usually sufficient. * because some tester opens a ticket saying you can enter an invalid email in the email field? Yeah, tha…

Because most users couldn't type their own email address, or even a properly formatted email address to save their life.

"My email address is joe.aol or was it aol.com@joe? Wait joeaol@com?"

Re: Stop Validating Email Addresses With Your Complex Regex

#80

Post by citricsquid »

smackfu wrote: post #34

The question is why people are validating the email in the first place. * to ensure it is deliverable? Well, then you better send them an email. * to let people know when they misread the labels and put something that was clearly not an email in the email field? A simple check for an at-sign is usually sufficient. * because some tester opens a ticket saying you can enter an invalid email in the email field? Yeah, tha…

    to ensure it is deliverable? Well, then you better send them an email.
I deal with user support for a site and I'd estimate at least 2% of our new users (>50 people PER DAY) enter wrong email addresses. Not "I forgot to put .com at the end" but "I thought my email was john.doe@gmail.com when it's actually john.doe@yahoo.com" which would pass validation with flying colours. The only real "solution" is to tell a user if the validation email has been sent yet (to deal with "well maybe I should wait 5 more minutes") and if it has and they don't have it allow them to change their email to their real email address. So many sites (incl. the one I manage) do not allow this, it's crazy.
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