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On the other hand, maybe the specification for email addresses is too loose.
Too loose for what though? To make it more useful as a communication format or to make it easier for developers to validate it? It's hard to believe that a tighter spec could have improved the former.
I never understood the point of enforcing the spec for user input. Even if done properly it may reject some working, but invalid email addresses. And it does nothing to increase your chances of getting a good email address. Your user is either willing to give you their real address or not. If they are willing, validating fully does not protect against typos and if they are not you will get a well formattd fake addres…
Some really broken/misconfigured mailer software may still accept the 'foo@bar@qux' syntax (route mail for user foo@bar via qux, or the other way round - I forgot which, since no sane system has implemented this since the word 'spam' came to mean bad e-mail.) So there may, theoretically, be some value in checking for the presence of exactly one @.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with matching against the fully fledged RFC compliant regex is that not all email addresses are RFC compliant. As I indicated in my comment above, I've abondoned trying to "correctly" or "completely" validate email addresses. There's onyl one thing certain in an email address: it contains the "@" character.
Cam you give an example of a noncompliant address that actually works?
Naturally I reset my password, and the temporary password arrives in my account, but when I went to put in the new password, it puked on the email I was using ... then I remembered what I had done, but till today whenever I go to put in the new password with the correct login (name+fandango@gmail.com) ... I keep getting sent back to the reset password screen, over, and over and over.
It knows its me, because my credentials (Hi xxxx) are displayed in the top right hand corner, but it simply won't reset my password correctly.
Fandango support is well ... worse than useless.
Its all very maddening ... an account I've had for lord-knows-how-long containing my entire theater going experience, inaccessible. Thats what I get for trying to be clever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Regarding the kinds of mailbox names an email provider will provide you with, it's up to the provider. My employer, for example, only lets us have firstname.surname, With the addition of a single digit in case more than one employee has that name. These limitations have nothing to do with standards compliance. 2) Gmail does allow you to send mail to non-legit, but standards-compliant addresses like {^|~!}@example.…
You are talking about naming conventions, that's something completely different. GMail does not enforce any 'firstname.lastname' patterns.
To reiterate - the mailbox names that a email provider will provide are subject to the naming conventions defined by that provider. Whether the convention is firstname.lastname; 5-7 characters only; alphabetic only; or 13375p34k transcriptions of characters from Lord of the Rings. None of that has anything to do with whether they are standards-compliant.
The test is whether they will send email to any RFC-compliant email address regardless of whether it conforms to their own mailbox naming convention. Gmail does.