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Question: would it be correct to have an email of the type name@TLD? Example: John@com Is this kind of name spec-compliant?
by young_unixer 8y ago
Question: would it be correct to have an email of the type name@TLD? Example:
John@com
Is this kind of name spec-compliant?
- treve 8y agoYes it would! We used to have a fake TLD for our internal Network. It just works.
- foepys 8y agoYes, it is. But as with many things on the internet, it might be spec compliant but nobody can use it because most programmers didn't actually read the spec and thus implemented what they think is the spec. Most websites will probably validate email addresses with regexes that expect a dot in the host part.
- ehnto 8y agoI still have trouble using .co instead of .com even. No dot would definitely throw a bunch of sites off.
- therein 8y agoThe situation is even worse with more obscure TLDs like .FYI. I honestly cannot register to a good 80% of the sites I want to.
- Qwertie 8y agoI have a .red domain and haven't hit any issues so far.
- walrus01 8y agoThere is also a human problem to consider, my spouse owns surname.com (their address is firstname@lastname.com , we run our own authoritative DNS and manage the MX records for lastname.com) , a bunch of people out there assume that they are such a foolish, technically ignorant person that they don't know how to properly format an email address. To the extent that signing up for some things in person just results in time-wasting questions and "what, really", so they just give a gmail address to some people.
- stevekemp 8y agoI remember receiving a phone-call from a tiny online shop - they seemed to think I'd mistyped my email address, because it was "their-company@example.com". They found it unbelievable that my email address could match their domain, and assumed I'd made a mistake.
- lucb1e 8y agoI do this too and it's most fun when giving my email address to physical stores. One time I was in a random optician's shop and had to ask what the store was called, "Such and such" - "alright then, that would be such and such at example.com".
- ValentineC 8y agoI use a catchall as well, but if I think my email address is going to be read by humans somewhere, I try not to throw people off by using something like firstname.companyabbreviation@example.com.
- ehnto 8y agoAbsolutely. I am always worried someone will think .co was me being silly and replace it with .com when giving it to people in person. I normally add "no M" to make sure they realise it's intentional.
- walrus01 8y agoBecause of this problem I'd be really hesitant to use .co for anything I care about unless I was Colombian or doing business primarily in Colombia.
- anonu 8y agoUnrelated to TLDs but on the subject of email validation: I like to put a +<some sort of tag> after the name on my Gmail address. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do to tag your emails. Most websites I've come across don't accept such an email address.
- roryisok 8y agoI've also yet to find a website that isn't fooled by gmail's dot trick. They all thing myname@gmail.com is a different address to my.name@gmail.com. In fairness this is not an email standard, but you'd think devs would have copped this by now and started to recognise multiple signups from the same user
- judge2020 8y agoValidator[0] node package seems to have a "normalizeEmail" function, site operators just need to start using it. 0: https://www.npmjs.com/package/validator https://www.npmjs.com/package/validator
- sincerely 8y agoOr maybe they should send email to the address their users give them?
- judge2020 8y agoA human creating many alt accounts may not be desirable by a website owner, so requiring multiple real email inboxes or running a mail server adds another barrier to prevent spam.
- Drdrdrq 8y agoNot really. I understand why website owners would like that, but it's simply not possible. In the worst case user will use mailcatch.com, aliases or one-time email accounts. No way you can check if the e-mail address is a "real" one. Fortunatelly.
- laumars 8y agoI wish people would stop using regex to validate email. Literally the only way you can check if an email address is a valid one is to send that address a validation email ("Click this link to confirm this is your email address" type thing). Validation emails also come with the added benefit of ensuring people enter their correct address (is not just randomly mashing the keyboard). Of course that doesn't stop them from using multiple addresses nor those burner address services, but neither would regex. The problem is validation emails take more dev time to build so some people get lazy and use form validation such as regex instead.
- mratzloff 8y agoYes. About the only thing you can count on is `.+@.+`
- Xylakant 8y agoA little more elaborate would be [^@]+@[^@]+. It might still be possible to construct an email address that is valid and does not pass via comments in the address, but chances that this happens are low.
- BjoernKW 8y agoValidating email addresses with regular expressions can make sense from a UX perspective alongside sending a validation email after the address has been validated as "likely a valid email address". If for example during a typical registration process the software merely sends an email instead of also trying to validate the address first the user either has to wait until the email has arrived before entering the remaining data or otherwise might end up with invalid registration data that cannot be retrieved anymore. In this case, the user would have to start over again. This problem could be alleviated by having a two-step process, during which the software merely asks for the email address in the first step and the remaining data can only be filled in after the email address has been verified. However, depending on the requirements of the software it might make sense to not just ask for the email address but additional required information during the first step as well, in which case validating with regular expressions provides a better user experience through feedback.
- ajdlinux 8y agoThe operators of the .ai TLD for Anguilla have done this for a while and hit interesting bugs in mail clients. (Also notable, they have an A record on the hostname "ai." - you can see their website at http://ai./ http://ai./)
- gcb0 8y agothe dot at the end is an ambiguity in a few specs. if I recall correctly, dns requires to end in a dot as it signals the root servers or something, but obviously can be left empty. then browsers started to support it, but over time bugs pilled up and now it is treated as a different hostname (e.g. "www.example.org" is completely different to your browser than "www.example.org." even though they are the same to the dns spec) then tls specs considers the dot in an earlier version, and they should be the same but because of the browser bugs it is all too much fun. my bank actually has a server that replies the same for domains with or without the root dot. but they only signed their certs for the no dot name, which again, is the same, but for browsers is kinda of not. ah! living Standards.
- phicoh 8y agoThe dot at the end has a technical meaning in two different contexts. The first is to disable search lists in the DNS stub resolver. If you try to look up, say 'ai', then the sub resolver is likely to append your current domain name during the lookup. Looking up 'ai.' disables that. The other use is in DNS zone files where everything that does not end in a '.' get the name of the zone appended. The for mail (SMTP) the dot at the end is implicitly present, and adding one is not allowed. HTML/HTTP basically doesn't define semantics with respect to the dot at the end. That's why "www.example.org" and "www.example.org." are different. They are different strings, and nobody defined them to be equivalent. At the same time, the name is just passed to the stub resolver in many cases. So search lists may be applied under the hood.
- JdeBP 8y agoUntrue. RFC 1738 was in fact quite explicit on this subject. It was almost universally disregarded. * http://jdebp.info./FGA/web-fully-qualified-domain-name.html http://jdebp.info./FGA/web-fully-qualified-domain-name.html
- kevinoid 8y agoI am not aware of any specifications which would prevent using mail hosts on toplevel domains. However, dotless domain names are currently prohibited by the ICANN Board New gTLD Program Committee,[1] so actually creating one may be a challenge. 1. https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2013-08-30-en https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2013-08-30-en 2. https://serverfault.com/a/721929/61174 https://serverfault.com/a/721929/61174
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- koolba 8y agoForget SMTP, you’d have more problems with bad email regexes on sign up forms that assume anything more than an @.
- roryisok 8y agoThis is why people should write proper code to parse and validate email addresses and not use regex
- 1996 8y agoregex are proper code when written competently
- bzbarsky 8y agoAssuming "competently" means "not using them when the grammar is not regular".
- mcny 8y agoI don’t even try. I put my hands up and accept [anything] @ [anything]
- Drdrdrq 8y agoWell, you can still check MX record for the second "anything", that should be pretty safe, right?
- ryanbrunner 8y agoI don't think that's sufficient on its own. If there's a CNAME on the domain, you'd have to follow the chain of CNAMEs to find an MX record (granted, that's not very common, but I think it's valid usage)
- 8y ago
- jwilk 8y agoRelevant informational RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7085 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7085 (Top-Level Domains That Are Already Dotless)
- fulafel 8y agoYes, and there are some traditional domains too with A records, at least this one: > host -t aaaa dk. dk has IPv6 address 2a01:630:0:40::58 I don't know if they run SMTP (my ISP blocks it) but at least it answers http://dk/ http://dk/ :)
- walshemj 8y agoInteresting but I suspect that whilst possible they would be reserved for the registry. A bit like in x.400 you could have a mail address of say C=UK CN=brian" but only if you where the ADMD operator - btw my boss did have that email address when I worked on x.400