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My email address is valid and has been valid for a really long time.. but about 5% of ecommerce shops refuse to accept it.. so they don't get my money. Don't g

My email address is valid and has been valid for a really long time.. but about 5% of ecommerce shops refuse to accept it.. so they don't get my money. Don't get clever, just follow the spec.

lisper 5y ago
> about 5% of ecommerce shops refuse to accept it That's surprising to me because there is nothing particularly weird about your email address. What exactly do they complain about?
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Quotes included or not?
  - lisper 5y ago
    Not. Obviously, or the rejection ratio would be a lot higher than 5%.
- brlcad 5y ago
  I would assume because it's only 2-chars (me) and they're filtering anything <3 as invalid.
  - lisper 5y ago
    Yeah, that's what I would guess as well. But there's a big difference between "follow the [ridiculously complicated] spec to the letter" and "don't do obviously stupid things like filter out email addresses with short names". The latter is good advice, the former not so much IMHO.
    - Domenic_S 5y ago
      For a couple glorious years I had a 2-letter email address at a single-letter .com domain. It was rejected a surprisingly small number of times.
  - isoskeles 5y ago
    Ah, that's a good assumption. My initial assumption was some sites have a very dumb whitelist of valid email domains. This seems more reasonable (although, also dumb).
jchw 5y ago
If you can show that "just follow the spec" ends up opening up more opportunity than it closes off, then you can convince people. However, when gmail, outlook, etc. do not allow these zany e-mail addresses, you're going to have a hella hard time convincing me of this unless you are in the 1% of spenders.
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  Do GMail et al actually prevent you from sending to and receiving from these zany addresses? Or merely prevent you from creating one @gmail.com?
  - jchw 5y ago
    Creating one. But when you consider just how many customers are using gmail and outlook addresses, and not to mention, GSuite/fastmail/etc. addresses under custom domains, it makes more sense why rejecting @gmail.com@gmail.com is worth more than allowing some crazy e-mail feature that is effectively not used.
    - not2b 5y ago
      The routing features are obsolete; they go back to the days when lots of email users weren't on the Internet directly and had to use relays. They are still in the spec, yes.
      - jchw 5y ago
        I assume it comes from similar lineage as UUCP paths. Either way, email standards are a bit ridiculous. It needs the kind of rehaul that occurred with HTML5 of looking at what email implementations actually do and pushing them in one direction. I suspect that is not happening ever, so failing that there will probably always be things in the spec that just simply don’t work across everything anymore.
skeeter2020 5y ago
>> Don't get clever, just follow the spec. I'd suggest being clever is wasting countless hours to handle your edge case. Or writing your own email validation in the first place.
- shard 5y ago
  > wasting countless hours Isn't email validation a solved problem in that there are services or ready software which provide RFC-compliant validation? If some company is wasting countless hours to do something because of Not Invented Here syndrome, isn't that the same as some company deciding to write cryptography algorithms on their own and reaping what they sow?
yupper32 5y ago
If 5% of ecommerce shops refuse to accept it, it's likely you being clever. My email is refused by 0% of ecommerce shops... because I just have a normal email. Don't be clever, pick a better email.
- drdaeman 5y ago
  What's "normal", though? "<8-10latinalphanumerics>@gmail.com?" My email is just "me@<my-last-name>.al"[1] which is just a tiny bit "unusual" - and over the years it got refused by a couple stores because of TLD. And Albania is not Cocos Islands, they're surely not popular with spammers. If a store believes there's only ".com" gTLD and nothing else (this had really happened to me, some galaxy-brain made a form with a hardcoded ".com" suffix; not even ".net" or ".org" were accepted, unfortunately I don't remember the site) - well, fuck that store, their loss not mine. Worst case, if I really want something they sell, I'll give them a throwaway email - which will contribute to their mail bounces after some time. __________ [1] ".al" is a ccTLD for Albania which is not a country of my citizenship or residence. I've picked the domain name as hack - because my first name is Aleksei and my first and middle names form "A.L." initials as well. That, and because all relevant .name domains were already taken.
  - yupper32 5y ago
    Might sound strange but yes, me@<my-last-name>.al is being clever. You found a nice short clean email by buying a domain from Albania and setting up a me@ address. That's clever. Think about it this way: either you can get some big brand .com email with no special username and never have an issue, or you can flail around 5% of the time and yell at the clouds. Should everyone accept your email? Of course! I'm just saying you live in real life, and in real life people suck at building email forms. The problems you run into are on you.
    - oarsinsync 5y ago
      > Should everyone accept your email? Of course! I'm just saying you live in real life, and in real life people suck at building email forms. The problems you run into are on you. No, the problems they run into are caused by (at best) mediocre developers. They’re entirely to blame. We have specs and standards for a reason.
alkonaut 5y ago
Your money is likely a minuscule part of the revenue and supporting your email would likely cost more. This was the point, that it is probably clever to choose a validation that covers 99.99% of customer emails rather than cover the whole spec.

My email address is valid and has been valid for a really long time.. but about 5% of ecommerce shops refuse to accept it.. so they don't get my money. Don't get clever, just follow the spec.

lisper 5y ago

> about 5% of ecommerce shops refuse to accept it That's surprising to me because there is nothing particularly weird about your email address. What exactly do they complain about?

mixmastamyk 5y ago
Quotes included or not?
- lisper 5y ago
  Not. Obviously, or the rejection ratio would be a lot higher than 5%.
brlcad 5y ago
I would assume because it's only 2-chars (me) and they're filtering anything <3 as invalid.
- lisper 5y ago
  Yeah, that's what I would guess as well. But there's a big difference between "follow the [ridiculously complicated] spec to the letter" and "don't do obviously stupid things like filter out email addresses with short names". The latter is good advice, the former not so much IMHO.
  - Domenic_S 5y ago
    For a couple glorious years I had a 2-letter email address at a single-letter .com domain. It was rejected a surprisingly small number of times.
- isoskeles 5y ago
  Ah, that's a good assumption. My initial assumption was some sites have a very dumb whitelist of valid email domains. This seems more reasonable (although, also dumb).

jchw 5y ago

If you can show that "just follow the spec" ends up opening up more opportunity than it closes off, then you can convince people. However, when gmail, outlook, etc. do not allow these zany e-mail addresses, you're going to have a hella hard time convincing me of this unless you are in the 1% of spenders.

BenjiWiebe 5y ago
Do GMail et al actually prevent you from sending to and receiving from these zany addresses? Or merely prevent you from creating one @gmail.com?
- jchw 5y ago
  Creating one. But when you consider just how many customers are using gmail and outlook addresses, and not to mention, GSuite/fastmail/etc. addresses under custom domains, it makes more sense why rejecting @gmail.com@gmail.com is worth more than allowing some crazy e-mail feature that is effectively not used.
  - not2b 5y ago
    The routing features are obsolete; they go back to the days when lots of email users weren't on the Internet directly and had to use relays. They are still in the spec, yes.
    - jchw 5y ago
      I assume it comes from similar lineage as UUCP paths. Either way, email standards are a bit ridiculous. It needs the kind of rehaul that occurred with HTML5 of looking at what email implementations actually do and pushing them in one direction. I suspect that is not happening ever, so failing that there will probably always be things in the spec that just simply don’t work across everything anymore.

skeeter2020 5y ago

>> Don't get clever, just follow the spec. I'd suggest being clever is wasting countless hours to handle your edge case. Or writing your own email validation in the first place.

shard 5y ago
> wasting countless hours Isn't email validation a solved problem in that there are services or ready software which provide RFC-compliant validation? If some company is wasting countless hours to do something because of Not Invented Here syndrome, isn't that the same as some company deciding to write cryptography algorithms on their own and reaping what they sow?

yupper32 5y ago

If 5% of ecommerce shops refuse to accept it, it's likely you being clever. My email is refused by 0% of ecommerce shops... because I just have a normal email. Don't be clever, pick a better email.

drdaeman 5y ago
What's "normal", though? "<8-10latinalphanumerics>@gmail.com?" My email is just "me@<my-last-name>.al"[1] which is just a tiny bit "unusual" - and over the years it got refused by a couple stores because of TLD. And Albania is not Cocos Islands, they're surely not popular with spammers. If a store believes there's only ".com" gTLD and nothing else (this had really happened to me, some galaxy-brain made a form with a hardcoded ".com" suffix; not even ".net" or ".org" were accepted, unfortunately I don't remember the site) - well, fuck that store, their loss not mine. Worst case, if I really want something they sell, I'll give them a throwaway email - which will contribute to their mail bounces after some time. __________ [1] ".al" is a ccTLD for Albania which is not a country of my citizenship or residence. I've picked the domain name as hack - because my first name is Aleksei and my first and middle names form "A.L." initials as well. That, and because all relevant .name domains were already taken.
- yupper32 5y ago
  Might sound strange but yes, me@<my-last-name>.al is being clever. You found a nice short clean email by buying a domain from Albania and setting up a me@ address. That's clever. Think about it this way: either you can get some big brand .com email with no special username and never have an issue, or you can flail around 5% of the time and yell at the clouds. Should everyone accept your email? Of course! I'm just saying you live in real life, and in real life people suck at building email forms. The problems you run into are on you.
  - oarsinsync 5y ago
    > Should everyone accept your email? Of course! I'm just saying you live in real life, and in real life people suck at building email forms. The problems you run into are on you. No, the problems they run into are caused by (at best) mediocre developers. They’re entirely to blame. We have specs and standards for a reason.

alkonaut 5y ago

Your money is likely a minuscule part of the revenue and supporting your email would likely cost more. This was the point, that it is probably clever to choose a validation that covers 99.99% of customer emails rather than cover the whole spec.