10 ms·

Tell HN: I can't buy a PS4 because of my email

57 points by kaeruct 5y ago

Just wanted to share this because I think it's ridiculous. I happen to have an email with one of the newer TLDs (like .pizza or .website). This somehow makes me unable to check out on the sony website. See: https://imgur.com/a/gL0u6JY Of course, the real error is swallowed by their frontend and all I can see is that an error has occurred. I have to dig into the network requests to find out the real reason why they don't want to take my money. Who comes up with this? Why is email validation still a problem in 2022? How can a normal internet user figure this out? If I wasn't a web developer I would have given up.

FroshKiller 5y ago
Well, a "normal" user probably wouldn't have an email address with one of those TLDs, for what it's worth.
- dewey 5y ago
  I can't use my ".me" email domain on Facebook. That's a regular country domain that could be from a "normal" user.
  - FroshKiller 5y ago
    Your email would probably be valid according to the pattern in the screenshot, which expects a TLD between two and four characters. Not sure what Facebook has to do with it, but your address is probably "normal" to Sony.
    - dewey 5y ago
      My point is mostly that email validation is broken in a lot of places even if it's not a "weird" ending.
- eimrine 5y ago
  But a normal developer still can allow users to have email on TLD with more than 4 letters anyway. Thank's God a webpage unless an app does not forbid to look at the code full of fancy regexps. It reminds me a situation when I could not register a bank account and nobody could help me, even the official support. There was (maybe even still is) an issue when the webpage tells me that my password must contain 4 digits but it did not tell that that digits must be in one chunk (abcd1234 or a1234bcd but not a1b234cd). Several friends of mine had to show me their passwords until I realized that their digits are not sparse.
- Avamander 5y ago
  You shouldn't check for a specific list of TLD's, you're going to get it wrong.
  - FroshKiller 5y ago
    The validator in the screenshot doesn't check for a specific list. The examples .pizza and .website would not validate because the pattern expects a TLD between two and four characters long.
theandrewbailey 5y ago
Have you tried contacting their customer support? Twitter shame them?
KptMarchewa 5y ago
Why would you buy new base PS4 in 2022?
- hmate9 5y ago
  Maybe because getting a PS5 is still difficult in most places
  - FearlessNebula 5y ago
    Getting a PS5 consists of signing up for Telegram alerts and waiting for stock alerts. Within 1-3 weeks you’ll snag one. In my opinion it makes sense to be patient for 3 weeks and get a PS5, which will surely be relevant for 5-7 more years. Keep in mind, PS4s are also difficult to find right now. They are still selling at the full $300 retail price if you can even find one, and used on eBay they are $250. Why pay $250 for a console that will stop getting new games this year or next year? Now granted, OP seems to be in a different country so maybe these circumstances are different for them but in the US certainly it does not make sense to buy a PS4, for the same price you can buy an Xbox Series S.
    - zht 5y ago
      or maybe they are too busy with the rest of their life to wait for telegram alerts, clicking on the link in time, checking out, etc etc?
      - FearlessNebula 5y ago
        It’s not a synchronous task. You don’t have to block your life, you set an alert and when you get the alert, you try to buy it. It takes 5 minutes for an attempt, and if it doesn’t work you try again next time. I know, because I did it when the shortage was at its peak. I set up telegram alerts and I kept my personal laptop on standby. If an alert came in, as long as I wasn’t in a work meeting, I opened my laptop and quickly followed through to the link. It just takes a little bit of patience but it’s not too bad. But hopefully the shortage improves soon and this will no longer be necessary.
hmate9 5y ago
Email validation should just be sending a confirmation email. Otherwise you end up with a super large regex and having to update it every time there is a new TLD.
- doubled112 5y ago
  I'd imagine the regex just doesn't get updated, leading to this exact problem.
  - gtirloni 5y ago
    No sane person keeps a list of all TLDs in a regex. It's huge and they keep changing.
    - hunter2_ 5y ago
      The regex in OP's screenshot just says that it needs to end with between 2 and 4 characters after the last dot.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      You could concievably regularly grab the list from http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt.
      - itronitron 5y ago
        i wonder why they haven't yet added '.corn' as a TLD
    - chockchocschoir 5y ago
      Indeed, that would truly be some insane regex and unfeasible to maintain. Here is the official list of registered TLDs from IANA: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt > Last Updated Wed Mar 16 07:07:01 2022 UTC Have fun keeping up-to-date with it.
chockchocschoir 5y ago
Email validation keeps being a problem because the rules keep changing. The assumption that .pizza is not a valid TLD was valid before, but is not valid anymore, but not everyone has updated themselves to understand these new rules. It could also be that they see a lot of fraud from people using non-traditional TLDs (basically the gTLDs) so they block those, but serve some generic error that looks like their email is not actually valid. But then email validation has basically always been an issue. The only real way of validating emails is to send an actual email to specified address and ask the user to input something that that email contains, but that adds a lot of work than some simple regex. I also used to use a uncommon gTLD, but then we're not "normal internet users", at this point at least, maybe in the future. Best work-around I came up with is having a traditional TLD that I can use when the system doesn't work with the email I usually use. I think this is the best thing you can do moving forward, because Sony is not the only ones fucking this up, there are plenty of services that don't accept your email if you use something like .pizza, .app or any other common gTLD. Edit: I should clarify. "Rules" is referring to regex rules, for the ones who are engaging in the fruitless endeavour of trying to validate emails with regex, not the "rules" as the specifications for what emails addresses are actually valid. I restate what I said elsewhere: only proper way to validate emails is by sending a email to the address and make the user input some data you sent in said email. Anything else is bound to not work for X% of users.
- mro_name 5y ago
  > because the rules keep changing the single relevant rule is the same ever since: do an opt in. The spelling of the email address is of zero relevance and must not be nosed at.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    You forget one thing: People make typos. Assuming Sony blocks all LEN(TLD)>3, do you think they’ll lose more customers than they’ll lose from them not getting their validation mail because they typoed their mail? I’d bet that the first group is far smaller than the 2nd. Now instead of blocking it would be nice if they just asked if you are really sure that’s your email, but it’s probably still better than just accepting everything and trying to send a confirmation, both from a business and from a customer-friendliness perspective.
999900000999 5y ago
A normal internet user would probably have a Gmail or another popular email address. As a web developer, I'm sure if you really want it one, you could create a quick throwaway email address using a small array of services. Let's think about how strange this as far a bit, if you have a smartphone at all, you'll either have an email address provided by Apple or Google. Google. If you choose not to utilize either one of these, that's your choice. At the same time, Sony has never been good with web technology, the PS4s online play has always been less feature-rich than Microsoft's offering.
- oauea 5y ago
  Nice victim blaming
  - FearlessNebula 5y ago
    It’s really not victim blaming. But it’s still bullshit nonetheless. The amount of power consolidated between Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, and other top providers is problematic. Imagine how much damage they could cause by cancelling accounts for a political dissident. We see the chaos here on HN all the time when somebody gets their account mistakenly closed for “fraud” by an AI mistake. There’s definitely a big problem here with email, and I don’t know what the solution is.
- iso1210 5y ago
  I have an iphone, it has various mail accounts on it, including my work one (.co.uk), my home ones (.net and .com), and an old gmail one. I have no idea about any apple email addresses.
- aysfrm11 5y ago
  A 'normal internet user' has an email address, the format of which is probably specified in some decades old RFC. Nothing else but the format should be checked and ANY kind of error should be properly communicated. I had two situations recently that cost me a substantial amount of time and effort, due to f**ed up email handling and non-communication to the user. Once I tried to sign up to Pinterest with my personal catch-all domain using the emai pinterest@mydomain.tld. Only received random errors no matter what browser and IP I tried, had to contact 'support' (three levels of bots) to eventually find out that 'pinterest' is a reserved word because of which they would not accept my email. Second situation in a hotel trying to connect to WiFi via a captive portal. Using email hotel@mydomain.tld (which I used to check in and was thus required to use in the portal) the page just refreshed again and again without throwing a user facing error. After significant back and forth at the reception I was educated that I was only allowed to use private / personal emails (meaning GMail). My own domain wasn't personal enough... Both situations could have been rectified easily if proper errors would have been communicated.
dsr_ 5y ago
Of course it's ridiculous. However, the solution is also obvious: get a new email address in a different domain specifically for this purchase. Free, paid, buy a new domain: all of these are options.
KevinThax 5y ago
Use Firefox relay to quickly set one up and forward it to you. I'm assuming you don't need to respond to these emails. If its one way traffic (from them to you) FF relay can most probably help you.
- KevinThax 5y ago
  Apologies, I read it as an "ask HN" and wrote this. Disregard if you've already found a solution
aninteger 5y ago
Retail stores should still be an option.
- RobertMiller 5y ago
  What are the odds he'd still be locked out of any online features that require a Sony account?
nicoburns 5y ago
It's pretty ridiculous. But it's also pretty common. I'd highly recommend getting a new email address if you don't want to continually run into these problems.
ilikejam 5y ago
Sony's playstation billing system is a mess and always has been. Forward slashes in addresses (e.g. <floor>/<apartment>) cause similar mysterious errors.
naoqj 5y ago
You can buy one, just use another email. You are welcome! >How can a normal internet user figure this out? If I wasn't a web developer I would have given up. A normal internet user will have a gmail or outlook mail address, not a .pizza one.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  Those are definitely the most common but a normal user might also not know it matters and sign up for a novelty email service so theirs can sound cooler.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  It isn't excusable. Email validation should be in the form of sending an email and clicking a link, not some 90s era regex.
  - lvturner 5y ago
    This is great in theory. In practice you can get banned from your provider due to a high bounce rate.
    - unethical_ban 5y ago
      Then that's a problem with the provider. I'm not completely ignorant of the inherent issues of email and spam, but solutions shouldn't be user-hostile. If a "is this real" filter is required, they should write a script to check for new TLDs daily.
      - xboxnolifes 5y ago
        A problem with the provider that leads to an issue with the service is also an issue to thee service.
  - frostwarrior 5y ago
    Maybe "normal users" are not a good parameter for comparison after all.
oefrha 5y ago
There are plenty of websites that only accept emails from common providers, like gmail.com, yahoo.com, etc. Forget about personal domains. Well, at least they usually tell you that in an error message.
franze 5y ago
my main email is 42 characters long. You would not believe how often my email gets rejected because it's >40 chars. I mostly experience by startups which launch a MVP via producthunt. So my guess it, it is in some framework or library....
- chockchocschoir 5y ago
  Why would you try to use a 42 characters long email when you seemingly have access to shorter ones? From your HN profile: > fe {at} f19n .dot. com Are you really commonly using a 42 characters long email? How does that work when you fill out paper forms that asks for emails? I usually use one that is 16 characters in total (including the domain part), and I already sometimes cannot fit it on the papers.
  - Avamander 5y ago
    Because people have longer names. I just "love" how anglosphere programmers just assume so many wrong things.
    - chockchocschoir 5y ago
      I love how people assume others are "anglosphere programmers". For the record, my official name is 40+ characters and I'm neither from nor live in any english speaking country. But peoples official names have nothing to do with your personal email addresses, as you usually get to choose whatever you want for those.
      - Avamander 5y ago
        Well there was that explanation or one other I won't mention. So you have a relatively long name and you are still asking why someone would use their real name in an e-mail? Because almost everyone else is, they should be able to too. It's not very difficult to understand really.
        5y ago
kaeruct 5y ago
I do have a "normal" email that I use for websites like this. I changed my email on my sony account to that. The biggest gripe I have with this situation is that it was almost impossible to figure out what the real problem was. I had to dig into the request to find the error that the frontend refused to show me. If they allow me to register an account with a weird email, why does having that weird email prevent me from paying?
- croutonwagon 5y ago
  >If they allow me to register an account with a weird email, why does having that weird email prevent me from paying? Often times the merchant or payment processor has different systems entirely (and data is simply scraped from the form and input into their system for you). Its happened to me before as well. Specifically when donating to my local PBS station... So the operator doesnt care what your account name is, but the merchant they use to process payments/ensure PCI may care.
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    I don't think they were really asking. I think they were pointing out that there is no evidense of this from the user's interface. They go to site x and it fails in inconsistent and unexplained way. It is correct to stick to that and pretend you don't have special insight into sepeerate building blocks and service boundaries behind the scenes.
buro9 5y ago
I have this problem. My email is <catchall>@david.kitchen and for most shops I will give them <shop>@david.kitchen . Mostly it works. But when it doesn't work it really doesn't work. And this is OK. If they don't support one of the recent TLDs then I can just fall back to using a throwaway email address. Or if I really need the item I will shop elsewhere :shrug The annoying edge cases: 1. When <catchall>@david.kitchen works but <shop>@david.kitchen didn't work... like they're actively trying to fight the use of unique email addresses. 2. When <catchall>@david.kitchen works for registration on a web site, but doesn't work for signing in on their mobile app. Because the app enforces different email validation than the website. This is pretty annoying, especially as some apps will put the "change email" functionality in the app... rendering the account useless. 3. When <catchall>@david.kitchen works for registration on a web site, but doesn't work for the payment provider and checkout section. This is by far the most frustrating as you've got so far and are invested in the purchase and now you're stopped. I have contacted vendors about this, it's brain dead. When email validation fails it's not because they are using a hard-coded list of domains, it's usually because they have a regexp pattern and only consider a 3 letter suffix valid. I do tell web sites I have this issue, and sometimes they listen. Mostly I take my business elsewhere. Oh well, my choice to have a "difficult" domain name. Also: People really don't understand email addresses. "What's your email?", "oh it's <shop>@david.kitchen", "If you work for us you're eligible to the staff discount, do you have your ID card?" - This happens, or some confusion of it, more than I would expect.
- Aissen 5y ago
  If you have a catchall, why not simply put <anything unique>@david.kitchen instead of <shop>@david.kitchen, and then use previously received emails to do any eventual pinpointing ?
  - buro9 5y ago
    I used to do this, and if signing up online it's fine. But IRL I'm not on my phone generating the email address when asked at the checkout. That inconsistency meant duplicate accounts, and TBH I figured I was making things excessively complex and <shop>@david.kitchen was perfectly sufficient for my goals. My goals are just to identify who was compromised when an email address leaks, and secondarily to prevent entirely unconnected merchants or organisations from trivially joining the dots on a connected identity. In both cases good enough is good enough and I'm not trying to achieve perfect security or privacy with email as that's virtually impossible.
dmd 5y ago
I don't even have a weird TLD. I've been using my domain 3e.org since 1996, and still to this day I get rejected by regexes that assume a domain name must start with [a-z].
- focusedone 5y ago
  OK that's the shortest privately-owned domain I've ever seen. Jealous!
  - dmd 5y ago
    A buddy of mine has 'ix.io' but .org is oldschool-er :)
  - _nalply 5y ago
    I had ti.cm but lost it.
    - od1nos 5y ago
      How do you lose a domain name?
      - _nalply 5y ago
        The registrar didn't send me a reminder to renew the domain. Lesson learned: If a domain is important to you, set up your own reminder to renew.
NazakiAid 5y ago
I wonder if a .sony email address would be rejected
trollied 5y ago
I had this with RedHat. I could not unsubscribe from a mailing list of theirs because the unsubscribe page, that was linked in an email sent to me, did not like a .digital TLD. They sent email to the address in the first place! Absolutely ridiculous.
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
somewhat unrelated, but i would have thought buying a PS4 from amazon (or other reseller) would be cheaper then buying directly from Sony...
- FearlessNebula 5y ago
  PS4s from resellers are very expensive right now because believe it or not, there’s a shortage of PS4s too. A used ps4 from a reseller is the same price as a brand new next gen Xbox series S.
  - 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
    wow interesting to know. I have a PS4 from 2014 gathering dust somewhere...
samwillis 5y ago
You have just prompted me to check our email validation, all fine, thanks! Interesting aside, I run an online store, something like 90% of customers have an email address from one of a main providers - MS, Google, Yahoo, Apple, and as we are in the UK BT. We have also seen a significant correlation between customers with a @btinternet.com or @yahoo.com and those that contact support more. You could say they are significantly more likely to be "difficult" customers. Of course my parents have a @btinternet.com email address... Finally, Yahoo has by far the worst deliverability, all our email (transactional & support, not mailing list) get through to other providers but with Yahoo it's as much as 50% of email just disappears at times, it's not even in customers spam folders.
_han 5y ago
I had the same issue at PlayStation, but with my own .com domain. I didn’t receive any validation emails on there, but after changing it to my gmail it was fine. Watch out when trying to change it back to your custom domain. I tried that and was locked out of my account. Had to call PlayStation support to change it back.
mxuribe 5y ago
Ugh, I feel your pain! I've had a .CC domain name for over a decade now, so this happens often to me. Happily, it is happening far, far less nowadays...so maybe in the future, more/other newer TLDs will be more accepted. Then again, .CC is technically associated to a country, so maybe its getting better because i think it is NOT technically a generic TLD. For this reason, and maybe other reasons to do with pseudo-privacy/pesudo-anonymity, maybe just have a silly, secondary email address from the big providers (e.g. gmail, yahoo, etc.) at your disposal...otherwise you will simply continuously bang your head against the wall with some of these services. ;-)
iso1210 5y ago
A normal internet user wouldn't need to figure this out, they wouldn't have a .pizza email, they'd have @gmail.com. There are two approaches 1) You can complain that they aren't serving you, and take your money elsewhere. They see the lost revenue and fix the problem, or they decide the cost of supporting you isn't worth the profit 2) You can conform and get a more normal email address like 99% of the world. I have enough issues when I give people my own domain.com address as they are confused it doesnt end in gmail or hotmail Most of the 1% that have the issues will conform, so you're left with 1% of 1% who draw a line in the sand. And that's great, good luck to you and the 35,000 other Americans that fit in that demographic. Big companies are interesting in the 99.99% that don't though. (1) is a symptom of the centralising, automation, and reduction in costs of services. If you don't fit in the 99% pattern (or even 90% pattern), you are rejected as you're not worth it, that's the direction the world is travelling in (google etc drop your account automatically rather than spend the money to look at it manually, you can sometimes get redress via complaining to your social network if you're lucky)
- croutonwagon 5y ago
  >2) You can conform and get a more normal email address like 99% of the world. I have enough issues when I give people my own domain.com address as they are confused it doesnt end in gmail or hotmail This one always makes me laugh. I got a quote from a garden center on some yard work last week. Guy was stunned i used my own TLD, made me verify it a couple times. Then sends me an email from.....@soandsogardencenter.com. I was a bit perplexed as to why it was confusing for him. I guess maybe he thought you had to be a company to have your own TLD. He definately didnt understand why i would run my own (which is totally fine, most arent really concerned with the minutia of email).
  - ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago
    Sorry to tell you, but in your example the TLD is "com". A TLD is not the same as a domain name, but rather a top-level domain (after the last dot).
    - 5y ago
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Give up. Sign up for an ordinary email, buy the PS4, get on with important things. There are too many screwed up websites in the world to get hung up on somebody elses.
l30n4da5 5y ago
Looks like more unit tests are needed for that regex
cabirum 5y ago
Developers should not reinvent email validation every time. A simple and well-known library implemented for most popular languages would help. I say check that one "@" is found in a string, and it's not the first or last character, and there's no spaces, (done! Try sending it!). This is how humans understand email addresses, no need to write a fully rfc-compliant parser.
- sethammons 5y ago
  Spaces are allowed too :) "totally valid @ email"@localhost
  - benibela 5y ago
    My last name has spaces in it I asked the admin at my department to give me a lastname@university.. address. But he refused. He said the spaces might break too many things. Even when I mentioned that would be a great stress test for the mailing system
croutonwagon 5y ago
This is pretty common actually....My families personal email accounts also uses one of the newer TLD's because i was able to get a relatively benign one. In those cases we just make an alias to a longer more of a PITA (ie croutonwagonsfamily.com) .com version and use that. I find older sites especially prone to this, since they are trying to get a legitimate email fromt he form and just assume the major TLD's are fine (noting that you can still throw junk in there anyway..) In some cases i still ahve a regular gmail account with permanent forwards set to the families gsuite accounts. TL:DR - Email is messy
xposs 5y ago
I'm constantly running into issues with my email address. It is of the type single letter @ customdomain.com. Many companies will refuse to accept such an email (even Microsoft O_o) for various tasks like customer support or even account creation.
outcoldman 5y ago
I have been using an email address `firstname@lastname.email` and with the help of FastMail also `sendername@firstname.lastname.email` for the last 8 years: 1. When you give your email somewhere, they are always trying to fix it and clarify, that is probably `firstname@lastname@gmail.com`. 2. When you give email with `sendername`, like `chase@firstname.lastname.email` - they say you cannot have this email address 3. A LOT of websites don't support `.email` addresses, just cannot pass through validation, and even if you do, that does not mean that later on you will not have a problem with something else. 4. Yes, I am still surprised that it is still possible to meet website that does not allow me to use `.email`. That is why I have a backup `.net`. But I keep using `.email` as my primary, as I believe I am part of the "team" who is trying to educate other developers, that those emails with more than 3 letters in first level domain are valid.
unmole 5y ago
So, what email address do you use to communicate with your registrar?
hakunin 5y ago
I switched to Fastmail with my own domain (max.engineer), and as I'm changing email on various services, I'm running into the same issues. Synchrony bank and treasurydirect.gov are among the offenders. My solution for these sites was to use another domain I own (a .com) mapped to the same Fastmail account. My preferred email validation is a combination of string contains '@', actually sending a verification email and/or making an MX lookup.
noz0mi 5y ago
28304283409234 5y ago
Fun fact: gmail supports proper emailaddresses, so "youraccount+<shop>@gmail.com" is allowed.

57 points by kaeruct 5y ago

FroshKiller 5y ago

Well, a "normal" user probably wouldn't have an email address with one of those TLDs, for what it's worth.

dewey 5y ago
I can't use my ".me" email domain on Facebook. That's a regular country domain that could be from a "normal" user.
- FroshKiller 5y ago
  Your email would probably be valid according to the pattern in the screenshot, which expects a TLD between two and four characters. Not sure what Facebook has to do with it, but your address is probably "normal" to Sony.
  - dewey 5y ago
    My point is mostly that email validation is broken in a lot of places even if it's not a "weird" ending.
eimrine 5y ago
But a normal developer still can allow users to have email on TLD with more than 4 letters anyway. Thank's God a webpage unless an app does not forbid to look at the code full of fancy regexps. It reminds me a situation when I could not register a bank account and nobody could help me, even the official support. There was (maybe even still is) an issue when the webpage tells me that my password must contain 4 digits but it did not tell that that digits must be in one chunk (abcd1234 or a1234bcd but not a1b234cd). Several friends of mine had to show me their passwords until I realized that their digits are not sparse.
Avamander 5y ago
You shouldn't check for a specific list of TLD's, you're going to get it wrong.
- FroshKiller 5y ago
  The validator in the screenshot doesn't check for a specific list. The examples .pizza and .website would not validate because the pattern expects a TLD between two and four characters long.

theandrewbailey 5y ago

Have you tried contacting their customer support? Twitter shame them?

KptMarchewa 5y ago

Why would you buy new base PS4 in 2022?

hmate9 5y ago
Maybe because getting a PS5 is still difficult in most places
- FearlessNebula 5y ago
  Getting a PS5 consists of signing up for Telegram alerts and waiting for stock alerts. Within 1-3 weeks you’ll snag one. In my opinion it makes sense to be patient for 3 weeks and get a PS5, which will surely be relevant for 5-7 more years. Keep in mind, PS4s are also difficult to find right now. They are still selling at the full $300 retail price if you can even find one, and used on eBay they are $250. Why pay $250 for a console that will stop getting new games this year or next year? Now granted, OP seems to be in a different country so maybe these circumstances are different for them but in the US certainly it does not make sense to buy a PS4, for the same price you can buy an Xbox Series S.
  - zht 5y ago
    or maybe they are too busy with the rest of their life to wait for telegram alerts, clicking on the link in time, checking out, etc etc?
    - FearlessNebula 5y ago
      It’s not a synchronous task. You don’t have to block your life, you set an alert and when you get the alert, you try to buy it. It takes 5 minutes for an attempt, and if it doesn’t work you try again next time. I know, because I did it when the shortage was at its peak. I set up telegram alerts and I kept my personal laptop on standby. If an alert came in, as long as I wasn’t in a work meeting, I opened my laptop and quickly followed through to the link. It just takes a little bit of patience but it’s not too bad. But hopefully the shortage improves soon and this will no longer be necessary.

hmate9 5y ago

Email validation should just be sending a confirmation email. Otherwise you end up with a super large regex and having to update it every time there is a new TLD.

doubled112 5y ago
I'd imagine the regex just doesn't get updated, leading to this exact problem.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  No sane person keeps a list of all TLDs in a regex. It's huge and they keep changing.
  - hunter2_ 5y ago
    The regex in OP's screenshot just says that it needs to end with between 2 and 4 characters after the last dot.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    You could concievably regularly grab the list from http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt.
    - itronitron 5y ago
      i wonder why they haven't yet added '.corn' as a TLD
  - chockchocschoir 5y ago
    Indeed, that would truly be some insane regex and unfeasible to maintain. Here is the official list of registered TLDs from IANA: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt > Last Updated Wed Mar 16 07:07:01 2022 UTC Have fun keeping up-to-date with it.

chockchocschoir 5y ago

Email validation keeps being a problem because the rules keep changing. The assumption that .pizza is not a valid TLD was valid before, but is not valid anymore, but not everyone has updated themselves to understand these new rules. It could also be that they see a lot of fraud from people using non-traditional TLDs (basically the gTLDs) so they block those, but serve some generic error that looks like their email is not actually valid. But then email validation has basically always been an issue. The only real way of validating emails is to send an actual email to specified address and ask the user to input something that that email contains, but that adds a lot of work than some simple regex. I also used to use a uncommon gTLD, but then we're not "normal internet users", at this point at least, maybe in the future. Best work-around I came up with is having a traditional TLD that I can use when the system doesn't work with the email I usually use. I think this is the best thing you can do moving forward, because Sony is not the only ones fucking this up, there are plenty of services that don't accept your email if you use something like .pizza, .app or any other common gTLD. Edit: I should clarify. "Rules" is referring to regex rules, for the ones who are engaging in the fruitless endeavour of trying to validate emails with regex, not the "rules" as the specifications for what emails addresses are actually valid. I restate what I said elsewhere: only proper way to validate emails is by sending a email to the address and make the user input some data you sent in said email. Anything else is bound to not work for X% of users.

mro_name 5y ago
> because the rules keep changing the single relevant rule is the same ever since: do an opt in. The spelling of the email address is of zero relevance and must not be nosed at.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  You forget one thing: People make typos. Assuming Sony blocks all LEN(TLD)>3, do you think they’ll lose more customers than they’ll lose from them not getting their validation mail because they typoed their mail? I’d bet that the first group is far smaller than the 2nd. Now instead of blocking it would be nice if they just asked if you are really sure that’s your email, but it’s probably still better than just accepting everything and trying to send a confirmation, both from a business and from a customer-friendliness perspective.

999900000999 5y ago

A normal internet user would probably have a Gmail or another popular email address. As a web developer, I'm sure if you really want it one, you could create a quick throwaway email address using a small array of services. Let's think about how strange this as far a bit, if you have a smartphone at all, you'll either have an email address provided by Apple or Google. Google. If you choose not to utilize either one of these, that's your choice. At the same time, Sony has never been good with web technology, the PS4s online play has always been less feature-rich than Microsoft's offering.

oauea 5y ago
Nice victim blaming
- FearlessNebula 5y ago
  It’s really not victim blaming. But it’s still bullshit nonetheless. The amount of power consolidated between Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, and other top providers is problematic. Imagine how much damage they could cause by cancelling accounts for a political dissident. We see the chaos here on HN all the time when somebody gets their account mistakenly closed for “fraud” by an AI mistake. There’s definitely a big problem here with email, and I don’t know what the solution is.
iso1210 5y ago
I have an iphone, it has various mail accounts on it, including my work one (.co.uk), my home ones (.net and .com), and an old gmail one. I have no idea about any apple email addresses.
aysfrm11 5y ago
A 'normal internet user' has an email address, the format of which is probably specified in some decades old RFC. Nothing else but the format should be checked and ANY kind of error should be properly communicated. I had two situations recently that cost me a substantial amount of time and effort, due to f**ed up email handling and non-communication to the user. Once I tried to sign up to Pinterest with my personal catch-all domain using the emai pinterest@mydomain.tld. Only received random errors no matter what browser and IP I tried, had to contact 'support' (three levels of bots) to eventually find out that 'pinterest' is a reserved word because of which they would not accept my email. Second situation in a hotel trying to connect to WiFi via a captive portal. Using email hotel@mydomain.tld (which I used to check in and was thus required to use in the portal) the page just refreshed again and again without throwing a user facing error. After significant back and forth at the reception I was educated that I was only allowed to use private / personal emails (meaning GMail). My own domain wasn't personal enough... Both situations could have been rectified easily if proper errors would have been communicated.

dsr_ 5y ago

Of course it's ridiculous. However, the solution is also obvious: get a new email address in a different domain specifically for this purchase. Free, paid, buy a new domain: all of these are options.

KevinThax 5y ago

Use Firefox relay to quickly set one up and forward it to you. I'm assuming you don't need to respond to these emails. If its one way traffic (from them to you) FF relay can most probably help you.

KevinThax 5y ago
Apologies, I read it as an "ask HN" and wrote this. Disregard if you've already found a solution

aninteger 5y ago

Retail stores should still be an option.

RobertMiller 5y ago
What are the odds he'd still be locked out of any online features that require a Sony account?

nicoburns 5y ago

It's pretty ridiculous. But it's also pretty common. I'd highly recommend getting a new email address if you don't want to continually run into these problems.

ilikejam 5y ago

Sony's playstation billing system is a mess and always has been. Forward slashes in addresses (e.g. <floor>/<apartment>) cause similar mysterious errors.

naoqj 5y ago

You can buy one, just use another email. You are welcome! >How can a normal internet user figure this out? If I wasn't a web developer I would have given up. A normal internet user will have a gmail or outlook mail address, not a .pizza one.

Tenoke 5y ago
Those are definitely the most common but a normal user might also not know it matters and sign up for a novelty email service so theirs can sound cooler.
unethical_ban 5y ago
It isn't excusable. Email validation should be in the form of sending an email and clicking a link, not some 90s era regex.
- lvturner 5y ago
  This is great in theory. In practice you can get banned from your provider due to a high bounce rate.
  - unethical_ban 5y ago
    Then that's a problem with the provider. I'm not completely ignorant of the inherent issues of email and spam, but solutions shouldn't be user-hostile. If a "is this real" filter is required, they should write a script to check for new TLDs daily.
    - xboxnolifes 5y ago
      A problem with the provider that leads to an issue with the service is also an issue to thee service.
- frostwarrior 5y ago
  Maybe "normal users" are not a good parameter for comparison after all.

oefrha 5y ago

There are plenty of websites that only accept emails from common providers, like gmail.com, yahoo.com, etc. Forget about personal domains. Well, at least they usually tell you that in an error message.

franze 5y ago

my main email is 42 characters long. You would not believe how often my email gets rejected because it's >40 chars. I mostly experience by startups which launch a MVP via producthunt. So my guess it, it is in some framework or library....

chockchocschoir 5y ago
Why would you try to use a 42 characters long email when you seemingly have access to shorter ones? From your HN profile: > fe {at} f19n .dot. com Are you really commonly using a 42 characters long email? How does that work when you fill out paper forms that asks for emails? I usually use one that is 16 characters in total (including the domain part), and I already sometimes cannot fit it on the papers.
- Avamander 5y ago
  Because people have longer names. I just "love" how anglosphere programmers just assume so many wrong things.
  - chockchocschoir 5y ago
    I love how people assume others are "anglosphere programmers". For the record, my official name is 40+ characters and I'm neither from nor live in any english speaking country. But peoples official names have nothing to do with your personal email addresses, as you usually get to choose whatever you want for those.
    - Avamander 5y ago
      Well there was that explanation or one other I won't mention. So you have a relatively long name and you are still asking why someone would use their real name in an e-mail? Because almost everyone else is, they should be able to too. It's not very difficult to understand really.
      - 5y ago

kaeruct 5y ago

I do have a "normal" email that I use for websites like this. I changed my email on my sony account to that. The biggest gripe I have with this situation is that it was almost impossible to figure out what the real problem was. I had to dig into the request to find the error that the frontend refused to show me. If they allow me to register an account with a weird email, why does having that weird email prevent me from paying?

croutonwagon 5y ago
>If they allow me to register an account with a weird email, why does having that weird email prevent me from paying? Often times the merchant or payment processor has different systems entirely (and data is simply scraped from the form and input into their system for you). Its happened to me before as well. Specifically when donating to my local PBS station... So the operator doesnt care what your account name is, but the merchant they use to process payments/ensure PCI may care.
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  I don't think they were really asking. I think they were pointing out that there is no evidense of this from the user's interface. They go to site x and it fails in inconsistent and unexplained way. It is correct to stick to that and pretend you don't have special insight into sepeerate building blocks and service boundaries behind the scenes.

buro9 5y ago

I have this problem. My email is <catchall>@david.kitchen and for most shops I will give them <shop>@david.kitchen . Mostly it works. But when it doesn't work it really doesn't work. And this is OK. If they don't support one of the recent TLDs then I can just fall back to using a throwaway email address. Or if I really need the item I will shop elsewhere :shrug The annoying edge cases: 1. When <catchall>@david.kitchen works but <shop>@david.kitchen didn't work... like they're actively trying to fight the use of unique email addresses. 2. When <catchall>@david.kitchen works for registration on a web site, but doesn't work for signing in on their mobile app. Because the app enforces different email validation than the website. This is pretty annoying, especially as some apps will put the "change email" functionality in the app... rendering the account useless. 3. When <catchall>@david.kitchen works for registration on a web site, but doesn't work for the payment provider and checkout section. This is by far the most frustrating as you've got so far and are invested in the purchase and now you're stopped. I have contacted vendors about this, it's brain dead. When email validation fails it's not because they are using a hard-coded list of domains, it's usually because they have a regexp pattern and only consider a 3 letter suffix valid. I do tell web sites I have this issue, and sometimes they listen. Mostly I take my business elsewhere. Oh well, my choice to have a "difficult" domain name. Also: People really don't understand email addresses. "What's your email?", "oh it's <shop>@david.kitchen", "If you work for us you're eligible to the staff discount, do you have your ID card?" - This happens, or some confusion of it, more than I would expect.

Aissen 5y ago
If you have a catchall, why not simply put <anything unique>@david.kitchen instead of <shop>@david.kitchen, and then use previously received emails to do any eventual pinpointing ?
- buro9 5y ago
  I used to do this, and if signing up online it's fine. But IRL I'm not on my phone generating the email address when asked at the checkout. That inconsistency meant duplicate accounts, and TBH I figured I was making things excessively complex and <shop>@david.kitchen was perfectly sufficient for my goals. My goals are just to identify who was compromised when an email address leaks, and secondarily to prevent entirely unconnected merchants or organisations from trivially joining the dots on a connected identity. In both cases good enough is good enough and I'm not trying to achieve perfect security or privacy with email as that's virtually impossible.

dmd 5y ago

I don't even have a weird TLD. I've been using my domain 3e.org since 1996, and still to this day I get rejected by regexes that assume a domain name must start with [a-z].

focusedone 5y ago
OK that's the shortest privately-owned domain I've ever seen. Jealous!
- dmd 5y ago
  A buddy of mine has 'ix.io' but .org is oldschool-er :)
- _nalply 5y ago
  I had ti.cm but lost it.
  - od1nos 5y ago
    How do you lose a domain name?
    - _nalply 5y ago
      The registrar didn't send me a reminder to renew the domain. Lesson learned: If a domain is important to you, set up your own reminder to renew.

NazakiAid 5y ago

I wonder if a .sony email address would be rejected

trollied 5y ago

I had this with RedHat. I could not unsubscribe from a mailing list of theirs because the unsubscribe page, that was linked in an email sent to me, did not like a .digital TLD. They sent email to the address in the first place! Absolutely ridiculous.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

somewhat unrelated, but i would have thought buying a PS4 from amazon (or other reseller) would be cheaper then buying directly from Sony...

FearlessNebula 5y ago
PS4s from resellers are very expensive right now because believe it or not, there’s a shortage of PS4s too. A used ps4 from a reseller is the same price as a brand new next gen Xbox series S.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  wow interesting to know. I have a PS4 from 2014 gathering dust somewhere...

samwillis 5y ago

You have just prompted me to check our email validation, all fine, thanks! Interesting aside, I run an online store, something like 90% of customers have an email address from one of a main providers - MS, Google, Yahoo, Apple, and as we are in the UK BT. We have also seen a significant correlation between customers with a @btinternet.com or @yahoo.com and those that contact support more. You could say they are significantly more likely to be "difficult" customers. Of course my parents have a @btinternet.com email address... Finally, Yahoo has by far the worst deliverability, all our email (transactional & support, not mailing list) get through to other providers but with Yahoo it's as much as 50% of email just disappears at times, it's not even in customers spam folders.

_han 5y ago

I had the same issue at PlayStation, but with my own .com domain. I didn’t receive any validation emails on there, but after changing it to my gmail it was fine. Watch out when trying to change it back to your custom domain. I tried that and was locked out of my account. Had to call PlayStation support to change it back.

mxuribe 5y ago

Ugh, I feel your pain! I've had a .CC domain name for over a decade now, so this happens often to me. Happily, it is happening far, far less nowadays...so maybe in the future, more/other newer TLDs will be more accepted. Then again, .CC is technically associated to a country, so maybe its getting better because i think it is NOT technically a generic TLD. For this reason, and maybe other reasons to do with pseudo-privacy/pesudo-anonymity, maybe just have a silly, secondary email address from the big providers (e.g. gmail, yahoo, etc.) at your disposal...otherwise you will simply continuously bang your head against the wall with some of these services. ;-)

iso1210 5y ago

A normal internet user wouldn't need to figure this out, they wouldn't have a .pizza email, they'd have @gmail.com. There are two approaches 1) You can complain that they aren't serving you, and take your money elsewhere. They see the lost revenue and fix the problem, or they decide the cost of supporting you isn't worth the profit 2) You can conform and get a more normal email address like 99% of the world. I have enough issues when I give people my own domain.com address as they are confused it doesnt end in gmail or hotmail Most of the 1% that have the issues will conform, so you're left with 1% of 1% who draw a line in the sand. And that's great, good luck to you and the 35,000 other Americans that fit in that demographic. Big companies are interesting in the 99.99% that don't though. (1) is a symptom of the centralising, automation, and reduction in costs of services. If you don't fit in the 99% pattern (or even 90% pattern), you are rejected as you're not worth it, that's the direction the world is travelling in (google etc drop your account automatically rather than spend the money to look at it manually, you can sometimes get redress via complaining to your social network if you're lucky)

croutonwagon 5y ago
>2) You can conform and get a more normal email address like 99% of the world. I have enough issues when I give people my own domain.com address as they are confused it doesnt end in gmail or hotmail This one always makes me laugh. I got a quote from a garden center on some yard work last week. Guy was stunned i used my own TLD, made me verify it a couple times. Then sends me an email from.....@soandsogardencenter.com. I was a bit perplexed as to why it was confusing for him. I guess maybe he thought you had to be a company to have your own TLD. He definately didnt understand why i would run my own (which is totally fine, most arent really concerned with the minutia of email).
- ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago
  Sorry to tell you, but in your example the TLD is "com". A TLD is not the same as a domain name, but rather a top-level domain (after the last dot).
  - 5y ago

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

Give up. Sign up for an ordinary email, buy the PS4, get on with important things. There are too many screwed up websites in the world to get hung up on somebody elses.

l30n4da5 5y ago

Looks like more unit tests are needed for that regex

cabirum 5y ago

Developers should not reinvent email validation every time. A simple and well-known library implemented for most popular languages would help. I say check that one "@" is found in a string, and it's not the first or last character, and there's no spaces, (done! Try sending it!). This is how humans understand email addresses, no need to write a fully rfc-compliant parser.

sethammons 5y ago
Spaces are allowed too :) "totally valid @ email"@localhost
- benibela 5y ago
  My last name has spaces in it I asked the admin at my department to give me a lastname@university.. address. But he refused. He said the spaces might break too many things. Even when I mentioned that would be a great stress test for the mailing system

croutonwagon 5y ago

This is pretty common actually....My families personal email accounts also uses one of the newer TLD's because i was able to get a relatively benign one. In those cases we just make an alias to a longer more of a PITA (ie croutonwagonsfamily.com) .com version and use that. I find older sites especially prone to this, since they are trying to get a legitimate email fromt he form and just assume the major TLD's are fine (noting that you can still throw junk in there anyway..) In some cases i still ahve a regular gmail account with permanent forwards set to the families gsuite accounts. TL:DR - Email is messy

xposs 5y ago

I'm constantly running into issues with my email address. It is of the type single letter @ customdomain.com. Many companies will refuse to accept such an email (even Microsoft O_o) for various tasks like customer support or even account creation.

outcoldman 5y ago

I have been using an email address `firstname@lastname.email` and with the help of FastMail also `sendername@firstname.lastname.email` for the last 8 years: 1. When you give your email somewhere, they are always trying to fix it and clarify, that is probably `firstname@lastname@gmail.com`. 2. When you give email with `sendername`, like `chase@firstname.lastname.email` - they say you cannot have this email address 3. A LOT of websites don't support `.email` addresses, just cannot pass through validation, and even if you do, that does not mean that later on you will not have a problem with something else. 4. Yes, I am still surprised that it is still possible to meet website that does not allow me to use `.email`. That is why I have a backup `.net`. But I keep using `.email` as my primary, as I believe I am part of the "team" who is trying to educate other developers, that those emails with more than 3 letters in first level domain are valid.

unmole 5y ago

So, what email address do you use to communicate with your registrar?

hakunin 5y ago

I switched to Fastmail with my own domain (max.engineer), and as I'm changing email on various services, I'm running into the same issues. Synchrony bank and treasurydirect.gov are among the offenders. My solution for these sites was to use another domain I own (a .com) mapped to the same Fastmail account. My preferred email validation is a combination of string contains '@', actually sending a verification email and/or making an MX lookup.

noz0mi 5y ago

28304283409234 5y ago

Fun fact: gmail supports proper emailaddresses, so "youraccount+<shop>@gmail.com" is allowed.