Valid Email Addresses

Re:Valid Email Addresses by baddox on Friday November 30, 2012 @02:19PM (#4854935)

I don't understand. Won't a correct-to-spec validation procedure take about as long to implement as an ad hoc procedure? I'm guessing a maximum of two developer-hours, and that's if you're extremely careful (i.e. unit tests).

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Re:Valid Email Addresses by jrockway on Friday November 30, 2012 @02:40PM (#4855037)

I recently did this:

    def is_email_address(email):
         return '@' in email

LGTM.

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Re:Valid Email Addresses by RandallBrown on Friday November 30, 2012 @02:50PM (#4855090)

ship it.

Seriously, the only way to validate an email is to send them an email and make them click a validation link. I

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Re:Valid Email Addresses by gav on Friday November 30, 2012 @03:17PM (#4855219)

It's not the worst way, but it's far from being the best way.

Sometimes you don't want the user to stop what they are doing, wait for an email to arrive, hope it doesn't land in spam, read it, click then link, and then continue. This is usually the case if you want them to buy something.

Secondly, what happens when they don't get the email? We had lots of problems where people where signing up from the following domains: gmail.cm, gmail.co, gmail.con, tmail.com, gmail.oom, gamil.com, hotamail.com, homtail.com, etc.

You want to firstly do some simple checks to see if it looks roughly like an email address. I like to see if it matches \S+@\S+\.\S+ (and ignore the few people with a top-level domain). Then you want to validate the actual domain to see if it's a misspelling of a popular address.

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