Email Address Length FAQ
eph.co.uk
Email Address Length FAQ
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: Email Address Length FAQ
#2Wouldn't the shortest possible Email address be 3 characters long, as in "a@b", where b is a TLD with a MX record, or did I failed to understand something critical?
Re: Email Address Length FAQ
#3Isn't @a.gg (nothing before @) valid as an email address according to the RFC? That was my conclusion last time I parsed it..
Re: Email Address Length FAQ
#4[edit: Looks like my view is just plain wrong. Skip this and directly read the replies]
IMHO email address fields need not be 254 characters in length. Something like 64 is perfectly defendable I think.
Why would a person sign-up with an email address of 200+ characters if he is not looking for a buffer overflow? Why would a sane person even bother to have such a long email address? How much time would he take to type that?
He would have tried the email id on many other websites and some of them should have rejected it. So the person obviously does have a shorter version of his email address for those sites.
How would a person fill in the emial address in a paper form where there is something like 30 fields for the email address?
I'd say 64 is enough. Anything above is just weird. I can do away with those two users who have such long ids.
Re: Email Address Length FAQ
#5[edit: Looks like my view is just plain wrong. Skip this and directly read the replies] IMHO email address fields need not be 254 characters in length. Something like 64 is perfectly defendable I think. Why would a person sign-up with an email address of 200+ characters if he is not looking for a buffer overflow? Why would a sane person even bother to have such a long email address? How much time would he take to typ…
How do you defend deliberately making something fail, when there's no benefit whatsoever?
A uuid is 32 characters all by itself, and you can't get much shorter without having to start managing the way they're allocated. Not all addresses represent people.
Re: Email Address Length FAQ
#6[edit: Looks like my view is just plain wrong. Skip this and directly read the replies] IMHO email address fields need not be 254 characters in length. Something like 64 is perfectly defendable I think. Why would a person sign-up with an email address of 200+ characters if he is not looking for a buffer overflow? Why would a sane person even bother to have such a long email address? How much time would he take to typ…
What would you gain from limiting it to 64 characters, versus complying with the RFC?
Re: Email Address Length FAQ
#7[deleted]
Re: Email Address Length FAQ
#8[edit: Looks like my view is just plain wrong. Skip this and directly read the replies] IMHO email address fields need not be 254 characters in length. Something like 64 is perfectly defendable I think. Why would a person sign-up with an email address of 200+ characters if he is not looking for a buffer overflow? Why would a sane person even bother to have such a long email address? How much time would he take to typ…
Given that conforming with the standard is effectively free, do you have any other justification for your non-conformal position of "I'd say 64 is enough. Anything above is just weird"?
Willfully and capriciously ignoring standard requirements that you think are "weird" results in non-conformal implementations that confound users and other developers attempting to interoperate with your systems. I'm genuinely surprised to be writing a paragraph defending standards conformance -- I'd have thought that this position was basic common sense among software developers.
Re: Email Address Length FAQ
#9Wouldn't the shortest possible Email address be 3 characters long, as in "a@b", where b is a TLD with a MX record, or did I failed to understand something critical?
You are correct. Although I don't think there are any TLD's with one letter.
Sean Hastings seems to be real, and ai has an MX record.
Re: Email Address Length FAQ
#10[edit: Looks like my view is just plain wrong. Skip this and directly read the replies] IMHO email address fields need not be 254 characters in length. Something like 64 is perfectly defendable I think. Why would a person sign-up with an email address of 200+ characters if he is not looking for a buffer overflow? Why would a sane person even bother to have such a long email address? How much time would he take to typ…
What would you gain from limiting it to 64 characters, versus complying with the RFC?
Remember the days of 640Kb of ram and 360k disks?
What did you lose by making your database not fit on a disk because you allowed 256chars for an email address and 32768 for a surname?