41–50 of 211 posts
"We see that bob@localhost doesn't look like a email address are you sure it's right?"
That way you can help users that messed up their email but not prevent all the corner cases. The idea is that most email addresses fall in a very narrow subset of the RFC: user@domain.tld and most people would have entered their email wrong if it didn't match that pattern.
No. This puts the burden of checking email validity on every user, even perfectly capable valid users. If you're validating for edge cases (mistakes or otherwise invalid addresses), treat it as an edge case and don't annoy users who can type.
My goto for email validation is /^.+?@.+?\..+?$/ Incase I've typed it wrong, that should basically work for anything that contains at least one @ and one dot, in that order, as well as at least one character at beginning, middle and end. It's served me well thusfar. Edit for clarification: The reason I prefer this over just checking for an @ is that if you're just checking for @ a common mistake like "me@hotmail,com"…
My favorite: /.\@.*\../ It should be similar to your version, but only matches just enough parts that require for email validation (i.e. "o@example.c" part of foo@example.com).
Assuming that running the regex is much faster than sending an email, it would probably be much less server load to check the regex and never send X% of emails, unless X is extremely small. (Looking up and implementing a regex) * 1 + (running the regex) * (every email) + (sending email) * (every valid email) Also, this post only considers the signup/activation use case. If you're getting an email for ecommerce to sen…
After some very basic checks, e.g. "contains at at least 3 chars, one of which is an @", you should Just. Send. The. Email.
Who bothers to type in a complex but invalid email address? The overwhelmingly common failure modes are:
1) Nothing entered at all. The basic check catches this.
2) Deliberate invalid email address. e.g. homer.j.simpson@springfieldnuclear.com - a regex will not catch this.
3) Typo in email address. e.g. john.smith@gmial.com - a regex will not catch this either.
The regex has downsides and complexity, but essentially no benefit.
Assuming that running the regex is much faster than sending an email, it would probably be much less server load to check the regex and never send X% of emails, unless X is extremely small. (Looking up and implementing a regex) * 1 + (running the regex) * (every email) + (sending email) * (every valid email) Also, this post only considers the signup/activation use case. If you're getting an email for ecommerce to sen…
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.
Don't bother even reading it. His solution is to "Just send your users an email. The activation email is a practice that’s been in use for years, but it’s often paired with complex validations that the email is formatted correctly. If you’re going to send an activation email to users, why bother using a gigantic regular expression?" Want to know why it's not more common than the regex "method"? His method has its own…
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…
I would rather lose a few users through a faulty regexp than lose double digit percentage through an email activation step.