6 ms·
Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
- adamzwasserman 5mo agoI enjoyed the deep dice. A lot of sensible advice, and enjoyed the deep dive. A lot of articles do not get a lot of that as right as this article does. Anyone who also enjoyed it would probably get a kick out of my article on the same subject that goes into the regex (which has some valid use cases): https://hackernoon.com/on-the-practicality-of-regex-for-email-address-processing https://hackernoon.com/on-the-practicality-of-regex-for-emai...
- amiga386 5mo agoAdd the lie "emails are delivered instantly, so the user can click a link I email them within 1 minute" And the lie "users always read emails on the same device they're logging into a website with" And the lie "users can always view HTML email so no need to send a plaintext equivalent, especially if I have a long complex URL I want them to click" And the lie "Clickable links sent in email are more secure than passwords so I'll stop supporting passwords and instead rely on email delivery of a link for all logins. Whoever clicks that link first is definitely the user who wanted to log in"
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- wodenokoto 5mo agoIf you have a password reset form, you probably already have a log-in with email with extra steps functionality.
- CPLX 5mo ago> Clickable links sent in email are more secure than passwords so I'll stop supporting passwords and instead rely on email delivery of a link for all logins God, I fucking hate that. I have a fucking password manager, I have various machines and things open. Just let me fucking log in. If anyone is reading this who is in charge of the internet please stop doing this.
- denkmoon 5mo agoThe people in charge of the internet are "cybersecurity" "professionals" who can't even follow NIST guidance.
- readthenotes1 5mo agoThe "change your password every 6 months" guidance?
- Kaliboy 5mo agoIt is with much hesitation that I write this, because I just implemented such a flow. My reasoning was this: my customers keep forgetting their password and somehow that becomes a trigger to contact me. No passwords, no problem. I tried convincing them to use password managers but that was pointless. But I see the pain and frustration so I will add passwords. And I quite liked the passkey idea, have to see how that works. Not that my customers would ever use it, but I would. It literally never occured to me.
- denkmoon 5mo agoTo be clear, no shade on actual devs faced with actual problems. My ire is reserved exclusively for the "we must do this because it is on the checklist, no I don't understand what a subnet is" people.
- butvacuum 5mo agoGood to see my take verified. But, where does the buck stop? What if your phone relies on email, but your email needs your phone.
- trumpdong 5mo agoIf you try to create a Discord account with Firefox Klar as your default browser, on Android, immediately upon signing up you'll be banned. I have to assume this is because it clears cookies and thinks you're a bot farm.
- nosioptar 5mo agoWhen I had protonmail, I often wouldn't get emails for hours, sometimes a day. Most other providers I've used range from instant to a few minutes.
- Terr_ 5mo ago> And the lie "users always read emails on the same device they're logging into a website with" Or the same browser, or the same browser-profile. For example, on my phone I have external links (from other apps) opening in incognito mode by default.
- butvacuum 5mo agoI don't think it's about security. It's about fobing off password resets on somebody else.
- tatersolid 4mo agoThis is market-dependent. We offer email OTP login for small business customers because it is “poor man’s SSO”. You’re basically validating the recipient is still at the company, able to receive at their work email. Larger customers have IT staff and set up OIDC or SAML with us. We don’t add an SSO tax.
- technion 5mo agoClaude, for my non Gmail domain, expects me to click a magic link on every device I wish to use it. Its wild that a product like that cannot take a password, or a passkey.
- JdeBP 5mo agoI'm surprised that this has not triggered all of the reminiscences of sitting running mailq at intervals for hours to watch mail that hasn't even left the local sending machine yet.
- teo_zero 5mo agoThe plus sign is a pet peeve of mine, too. But I stopped keeping a list of bad sites when their number has become double digit!
- jeffbee 5mo agoThis article says that Gmail can't handle address literals. I personally wrote the IPv6 address literal support for Gmail, so this annoys me. I just tested it and it shortened "[IPv6:2001:etc:etc::192.etc.etc]" down to "@2001" then generated an extremely terse mail delivery subsystem notification that I've never seen before. Which is why you should never just rewrite software without understanding why all the test cases are in the test suite!
- farfatched 5mo agoCould they have consciously chosen to remove that functionality? E.g. to simplify code, or if they wanted all mails to have a domain (if, for example, they wanted to integrate with reputation systems that were domain oriented)?
- jeffbee 5mo agoBased on the incredibly basic bounce message, I suspect the problem is that the frontend eats the address before it even gets to delivery. To your question, yes any product decision is possible, but enterprise/government people are surprisingly demanding about this stuff working because they have extremely weird requirements for routing mail to and through legacy systems. So I bet this still works at the mailer level and is broken in the UI.
- jcranmer 5mo agoI chuck IP address literals (both IPv4 and IPv6) on the list of things that you should care about for email if you're writing an MTA or an MUA but should otherwise generally not care about supporting if you're using email for something else (e.g., as a UID for login).
- farfatched 5mo ago> but enterprise/government people are surprisingly demanding about this stuff working because they have extremely weird requirements for routing mail to and through legacy systems. So I bet this still works at the mailer level and is broken in the UI Interesting context, thanks.
- farfatched 5mo ago> It’s likely that more people out there are being filtered by badly-implemented form validation than there are being filtered by their own need of hand-holding. I wish this was asserted with evidence. The author might suggest this because they have unrealistic views of some users. > In the year of our lord 2026, you can reasonably expect your users to know how to type their own email address - or even better, auto-input from their OS, browser, keyboard app, or password manager. This really depends on who your users are. I have multiple family members who have healthy memory, but can't accurately remember their email address everytime: the localpart, the domain, the syntax, everything. Sending an email verification isn't sufficient, because if the user has typo'd ".com", they might never receive that email, and the user might never be back, or then have to escalate to support. Meanwhile, if a site is opinionated on TLDs, they might prevent those users facing issues. I'm sure there are many sites were users have a large variety of odd email addresses, but also there are sites that cater to mostly non-technical users within 1-2 locales, and so may find the friendliest UX is having opinionated validation.
- trumpdong 5mo agoThere's something you can do in between - you can check the domain has an MX record.
- farfatched 5mo agoYes, and the MX check is pretty simple to implement. But it is still lots more complicated than copying some imperfect email address regex, and for many sites, it's unlikely to even be worth spending much more effort than that. Realistically, many sites can defacto choose to accept email addresses of few patterns. If a user's email address happens to be rejected, then they are either a non-technical user who quickly learns that they need a more commonly accepted email address, or a techie, who keeps a backup email address for these cases, and rightfully holds a grudge. Most sites just aren't going to care enough to do anything more complex, for annoyed techies. See also, IPv6 support. And yes, I get annoyed if a site doesn't accept my domain-under-a-less-common-tld, or doesn't support IPv6. :)
- account42 5mo ago
- sohex 5mo agoIIIRC in terms of clients mutt (&co) will actually handle “@“ in the local part correctly. > But the real reason I do that is just because I just like to sit in anger whenever this breaks the user experience because of programming errors or inconsistencies. Genuinely delighted by the fact that I’m not alone in that.
- gerdesj 5mo agoEmail is just like physical mail and thankfully just as endearingly human (sometimes). Once upon a time (1970/80s) I lived on and off in a mystic land called West Germany. Our postal addresses ended with incantations such as BFPO 40. Around 1985ish my granny send a Christmas card to us. I should note that she was at this time nearly seventy and sadly suffering from Parkinsons. She addressed the card, in rather crabbed but legible handwriting, to: Graham and Heath BFPO 40 My mum's name is abbreviated - her daughter. At that time Rheindahlen (nr Moenchengladbach) had a pretty large contingent of Brits in it - it was HQ (BAOR). The card arrived well before Chrimbo and it took about a week judging by the post mark, which was petty normal in those days. She shoved it into a post box in Ipplepen, nr Newton Abbot, Devon and it found its way to an obscure address in another country. I seem to recall she also forgot the stamp but it still got through. I'm sure mail like that becomes a point of honour to deliver and HM PO and BFPO did the job admirably. That attitude is how email MTAs are generally designed to work. They cling on to the good old days and sadly the world is a bit shit. Case sensitivity ... lol!
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 5mo agoNew rule: when emailing someone, you need to include their name. If you do that, the email delivery gods will correct typos in your email address.
- cjs_ac 5mo agoBill Bryson claimed to have received a letter addressed to ‘Bill Bryson, Writer, Yorkshire’. I have some cousins who live in a small town in Australia where the houses have neither names nor numbers. You just address the envelope to ‘<name>, <street>, <town>’, and it’s the postie’s responsibility to know where everyone lives. (‘Postie’ is the official job title in Australia Post because it’s gender-neutral.)
- KurSix 5mo agoI love these examples because they show that addressing has never really been as formal as we like to pretend
- jiveturkey 5mo ago> TL;DR: Don't overthink it, just send a verification email. pretty bad advice, if taken only as written, without adding more flavor on top. the major email providers will penalize you if you generate too many undeliverable emails. thus, if you just send a verification email without any pre-validation, it's pretty easy to get into a DoS situation where current/valid users don't get important email sent to them, or that email is significantly delayed, plus incur huge operating cost to resolve the problem. some form of rate limiting is needed, plus IMHO it's better to use a verifier service or your own heuristic or ML model to test for email validity including valid but fake/spammy/disposable addresses. sorry, but we are way past the point of being able to have nice things, esp. when we're talking about email. the "lies" part of the content is great. people do assume all those wrong things. however the TLDR is just wrong, and potentially harmful.
- trumpdong 5mo agoI think the only way to deal with that right now is to hire a company whose job is to deal with it. They'll random-check your outgoing emails are indeed what you say they are, and they maintain a reputation with the big providers for checking it properly. What pre-validation could you do that would possibly be useful?
- jiveturkey 5mo agoentropy check, for one
- teo_zero 5mo ago> the major email providers will penalize you if you generate too many undeliverable emails. I suspect the rate at which new users may try to create new accounts and type a wrong email address is too low to be noticed by reputation metrics.
- AndroTux 5mo agothere's bad actors that use bots to sign up to websites using bogus data.
- ashley95 5mo agoThis is cute and all. But for anyone coming here for real-world advice: just use a regex, normalize to lowercase, and surface any errors to users so they know if their email got rejected. This will avoid 99.9% of issues and work for 100% of real human users. This is what everyone else does, and if you have a user with an esoteric email, they will still be able to furnish another one that passes this validation.
- pif 5mo agoDisplay a warning and propose to edit instead of blocking the operation: your customers will be happier!
- tracker1 5mo agoVerify all email address entries before you start using it... I absolutely HATE how much garbage I get because a few people don't understand you actually have to get an email address before you start using whatever you like.
- ashley95 4mo agoRight, maybe I worded my response a bit vaguely. Of course you need to do an opt-in and verify them. My point was rather that if you are operating a service with human users, there is no need to deal with quoted local parts, mixed-case, non-ascii, etc. You will just run into bugs (oh, the user signed up on an iPhone and the email field was auto-capitalized and now they can't find their account?) for almost no marginal benefit.
- riddley 5mo agoI have a gmail address that at least three other people think is their address. I constantly get emails for the dumb stuff they sign up for. NONE of them ever have an "I didn't request this" link. I mean, I get it. That won't make them money, but oh man is it annoying.
- JimTheMan 5mo agoI get scammers using my email to sign up for websites, but they very obviously cannot login to my account. I often wonder what is in it for them. I'm sure someone on HN can tell me!
- AndroTux 5mo agoI assume they just need a valid email address to put in and hope they can use the service without email verification.
- vintermann 5mo agoCommission schemes, possibly. Sign up with their code and they get something out of it. So they submit 10000 harvested addresses, and hope some small % of them think it's something they signed up for and complete the registration process. You'd think big companies would know better than enlisting spammers to spam on their behalf, but I'm pretty sure Netflix had a scheme like this a few years ago. "Grow at any costs" sites like streaming or social media are probably happy with a tiny bit of plausible deniability for their spamming.
- zephen 5mo agoI have exactly the same problem. > I mean, I get it. I don't. Seriously, that's a huge fricking red flag. Obviously, most of those companies I would never do business with anyway, but this puts it over the line for all the others. If they don't understand the first thing about validating their putative customers' emails by, you know, sending an email saying "is this really you?" then they've completely proven their technical incompetence. The worst one is robinhood. I have two different email addresses that different people have used to sign up for robinhood accounts (back when they were giving anybody an account). Occasionally, I tweak them about sending me shit. "Sure! Just send us a copy of your photo ID to prove you're not that person." Nah, bro, you've proven you're clueless, and there's no way I'm sending PIA to clueless people.
- miningtcup 5mo agoI would like to point out that the "suggested" validation pattern, ^[^@]+@[^@\s]+$, can filter out valid addresses. "user@something"@example.com is a valid address, and excluding @'s in the user part rejects it.
- zenoprax 5mo ago> "user@something"@example.com is a valid address I appreciate your commitment to correctness but like [XKCD 1172](https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/) ... the user is clearly in the wrong at this point.
- account42 5mo agoIt's OK to reject technically valid emails that will only be used by RFC nerds trying to prove a point.
- chrisandchris 5mo ago> It turns out that allowing senders to omit dots is common but by no means universal! I think this is mostly common with Gmail-heavy countries and does not apply to Europe? At least I do not know of anyone that thinks so.
- mmh0000 5mo agohttps://fightingforalostcause.net/content/misc/2006/compare-email-regex.php https://fightingforalostcause.net/content/misc/2006/compare-... This is one of my favorite articles on validating emails using RegEx, I fondly remember reading it over 15 years ago. It's stuck with me ever since.
- SeanLuke 5mo agoThese are waaay too complicated. Web developers can't even handle the easy stuff. My email address is of the form sean@foo.bar.baz, and email address validators on websites reject my address about 30% of the time because it has two periods.
- christophilus 5mo agoHonestly, I just validate that it has an @ and then let it through. The actual sender (mailgun, or whatever) can do the dirty work for me.
- Joker_vD 5mo ago\.{1,100}@\.{1,100} I'd probably also have a red warning line under the input field for something really fishy and also most common typos (like "gmail.con") but other than that, I'd let it through.
- JuustoKakku 5mo agoI've had sites correct me with an email address ending in ".fi" with "are you sure you don't mean ".fr"?
- account42 5mo agoNot unreasonable if those sites are mostly serving a French audience.
- jamesfinlayson 5mo agoJust had to update this this week - a previous dev had used 2,4 and someone came through complaining with a six character domain suffix. Apparently 24 or so is the current limit for a real domain suffix.
- JdeBP 5mo agoEven that's not the true length limit of a label in the Domain Name System. (RFC 1034 § 3, for the curious.) So someone is likely going to be fixing that, years down the line. Then of course there's the fact, as called out earlier, that there can be more than 2 labels in a domain name.
- davidw 5mo ago[Old man voice] Back in my day these kinds of articles loved pointing out that, well, the email address could be a UUCP address and that's a whole different parsing situation. Of course, even then in the mid 90ies, UUCP was not something one really encountered outside of "so you think you're going to parse an email address with regexp?!" articles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing
- mesrik 5mo agoOh, and there were more than just UUCP bang paths. IBM Memo, Novel Netware etc. groupware and such X.400 and routing those required also odd email conventions. VAX VMS addresses did have % left side routing in too.
- smelendez 5mo agoAnother one is that you can tell “professional” from “personal” email addresses or that every address even cleanly fits into just one category. A lot of small business owners use gmail or a longstanding ISP account. A lot of people have personal email addresses you can’t easily distinguish from professional ones, between college alumni addresses, personal domains, and obscure ISP and email providers that aren’t in your database.
- TZubiri 5mo agoSoooo, let's just send a validation email and if they confirm the code, then it's a valid email? Functionally there's no false positives or false negatives
- AndroTux 5mo agoThere's a lot of false negatives because emails get stuck for hours, get blocked by the spam filter or fail to be delivered for whatever reasons.
- atoav 5mo agoI think most of these issues are easy to resolve by being more permissive and supporting what the technical standard allows for. The Big Problem™ however is case sensitivity in the local-part, because there multiple incompatible things collide: 1. Users are not universally aware of case (in)sensitivity in one direction or the other 2. Existing systems may or may not interpret case at all My preferred solution would be to adjust the standard to ignore case in the local part by forcing it to lowercase. That aligns with most of the systems and mental model of technically proficient users anyways. It makes much more sense from an UX standpoint since the goal is to be imambiguous. If we were to enforce the opposite: case sensitivity in the local part this would have multiple downsides: 1. It is inconsistent with itself by making the local part case sensitive but the host part not, that is harder to explain 2. You have to train users to be precise about case on entry. As someone who worked in IT-support, this is a very bad idea. This includes second-order issues like phishing attacks by silbling emails where just the case differs 3. If your service stores email addresses it will need to know whether that specific Mailserver/client/etc treats the email as case-sensitive or not In my eyes email servers that allow case sensitive local-parts are functionally broken, even if they don't break any rules.
- account42 5mo agoThere are two parts where the case (in)sensitive distinction matters: - what case you use to send mails - what rules you use to determine if two email strings are the same user For the first you can and should always use the address exactly as entered. For the second that's going to be a guess anyway and the exact rules depend on what false positives and false negatives mean for your use case - and you are going to have at least one of those two. Assuming case insensitivity here is generally reasonable for most use cases.
- atoav 5mo agoOne thing I have learned about verification is: Don't just put a link into your mail that directly verifies an email when visited. At least put some button or code input field there. Why? There are mail clients that will automatically open links for users and if that link is now invalid the user is confused about being able to click them.
- greengreengrass 5mo agoOr, even easier, just make the call idempotent. The user doesn’t know anything and doesn’t have extra clicks, and it doesn’t matter much if the mail client actually did the “confirming” given it’s proven the email address is valid at that point. The token was recently used? No problem! Must be a duplicate click, or a refresh, or the user left the browser tab open and their mobile device refreshed when they reopened the browser app, etc.
- Dylan16807 5mo agoYou don't send confirmation links just to prove the address is valid.
- Ekaros 5mo agoAlso much more critically. Just because mail is successfully delivered does not mean it is in the right inbox. So just link being visited by automation is far from enough in confirming that right person received the mail.
- p0w3n3d 5mo agoYou really did -- in your domain name, didn't you?
- ramon156 5mo agoI wonder if bot traffic is less if an emdash is included.
- croes 5mo agoAnd even if you know that an email address is perfectly valid it still could be simply wrong because of a tpyo.
- julian_t 5mo ago"Email addresses always have a 'normal' TLD" I registered a ".consulting" domain for my little company when they became available, and it has proved highly problematic ever since. Strangely (or perhaps not) it seems to be the larger players that have the most problems. I would at lest have expected ISPs and comms companies to keep up with this (looking at you, Three)
- dijit 5mo agoI once worked for a company that had a .company gTLD but not the .com It was also a bloody nuisance. Spam filters were one thing but there were so many validation forms that failed. Every reasonable variation of the company name as a .com/.net/.org was taken, including <companyname>company.com Ugh, what a nightmare. Domain holders are the landed gentry of tomorrow if we keep this up.
- merelysounds 5mo ago> Every reasonable variation of the company name as a .com/.net/.org was taken, including <companyname>company.com Even then it seems better to come up with a different prefix, or suffix (or both!), just to stay with ‘.com’. Of course hindsight is 20/20 and I did the same, my personal homepage used to have a ‘.xyz’ address.
- account42 5mo ago> Every reasonable variation of the company name as a .com/.net/.org was taken, including <companyname>company.com That also means that customers WILL confuse your company with others in non-domain contexts so perhaps it's a good idea to choose a more unique company name.
- thih9 5mo agoAnother anecdote, I no longer use my ‘.email’ email address for the same reason.
- KurSix 5mo agoThe annoying bit is that owning a domain should make email feel more stable and professional
- frereubu 5mo agoWe have a UK client in the healthcare industry who registered the domain clientname.healthcare, and they rapidly found that the NHS imposed regexes which rejected name@clientname.healthcare emails. Aside from regexes though, I also think the new TLDs confuse quite a lot of people. name@clientname.healthcare just doesn't click as an email address as quickly as name@clientname.com, and I'm in tech so I'm sure it's much more confusing for people outside that space. In fact, that reminds me that we built a site for another client for use inside an exhibition space which was spacename.house and against our advice they put that - without www or https:// - on exhibition panels for use on mobile phones. I am absolutely convinced that most people didn't realise it was a web address.
- croisillon 5mo agothe domain name of my former employer was 18 digits long and i had to login in 10 services a day with it, it was a bit horrible having a 10 digits tld is self-harming
- clan 5mo agoI have noticed many non-techies simply put words into the address bar and click on the first link from the search result. So if people just remembers spacename.house then that might be enough. My dad tend to skip the TLD part as well. The results usually work. When they do not - he gets very confused. The Internet is really a gold rush for scammers.
- connorgurney 5mo agoI did similar several years ago with the .services TLD. Lo-and-behold, I bought the .com not long afterwards!
- dspillett 5mo ago> rejected name@clientname.healthcare emails For years I've had a catch-all subdomain to give out addresses like company@sub.domain.tld which makes filtering out the junk when companies invariably sell their email lists or get hacked much easier. It is getting rarer, but I still occasionally run into sign-on forms that don't allow more than one “.” after the @ unless it is due to a recognised two-part country suffix like .co.uk. I would never use something that isn't a country TLD for email for this reason, I assume there are a lot of bad systems out there that will incorrectly see them as incorrect.
- Freak_NL 5mo agoThis all old hat, unfortunately, and also a thing which will be gotten wrong by developers for years to come. Just shouting 'give me a regex for validating email addresses' will make an LLM like ChatGPT happily output bullshit suggesting some overlong regex which is flawed precisely as outlined by the linked article, even though no one is arguing for those long unmaintainable regexes once they've seen the light. Ah well. Where there is still room for improvement is in how email addresses are often made a little bit anonymous by a lot of websites. Did you ever see something like 'j*h@gmail.com'? Oh wow, that neatly leaves out John Smith's full name! Like showing only the last four numbers of an IBAN or credit card. Except for us edge cases with a personal domain, where I then get 'm*l@myfullname.nl'. So stop that. Store it next to the bit of knowledge about validating email addresses — the bits of knowledge you use to correct junior developers and senior idiots.
- KurSix 5mo agoThis is a nice sibling problem to validation. In both cases, the bug is assuming an email address has a predictable human structure
- FinnKuhn 5mo agoI just tried this with Claude Opus 4.8 and I think it don't see any of those issues: The first sentence is that there is no single regex that perfectly validates every technically valid email address. I think that is a good start. It then recommends the regex used for <input type="email"> and explains that this would cover the majority of email addresses used by actual people. It also shows an improved regex that handles dot-atom local parts, quoted strings, domain names, and IPv4 domain literals, but doesn't cover things such as comments, full IPv6 literals, or internationalized addresses. It ends with the only correct advice (in my optionion): Send a confirmation email.
- Freak_NL 5mo agoDoes it say 'don't bother with a regex beyond checking it contains an @ surrounded by arbitrary pieces of text?' This still sounds like it is leading developers to conclude that they should use a too complex regex and then send a confirmation email. Claude Sonnet says: > A practical email regex that covers the vast majority of real-world addresses: > > ^[a-zA-Z0-9._%+\-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.\-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}$ Which is still way more complex than needed (and takes effort to read), and buggy according to years of blog posts written about this topic. Of course the problem is the developer asking for a regex at all, but the must-regex-email instinct seems heavily engrained in our collective psyche. I have no idea what other pay-to-play models say.
- dvh 5mo agoIt's not lies. And it's not about me either. If I collect email address, it will be used somewhere, someday, in god knows what app. If I'm the one collecting the email, I will make it as restrictive at possible so that it doesn't causes issues down the line. If it's too different than John.Doe_123@example.com, it's best to reject it. For robust systems the goal was never to allow user type any technically valid email. It is to allow only emails that will not cause issues in the future.
- KurSix 5mo agoEmail addresses are a great example of boring infrastructure hiding decades of edge cases
- rock_artist 5mo ago> In that sense, it’s actually pretty surprising that so much of the world’s population wasn’t able to put their own name, in its native written form, in an email address until just 14 years ago. Maybe for some internal usages. but imagine someone from a country using different language and characters gives me a card with their email. It's now far less portable for me to use it. Those days, I surely could picture it and find the email most likely getting it right. But email as means of international communication, like passport, should be readable as possible or it kills its purpose. Even with ASCII emails I have, I already sometimes struggle to pass them over phone or other methods :)
- account42 5mo agoAgreed, (a subset of) ASCII as the lingua franca of identifies is very useful. Almost all languages managed pretty well with ASCII-encodings of their special characters even if some individuals choose to be offended.
- mitxela 5mo agoWhat if the agreed upon international standard alphabet didn't happen to be the one you natively write with? If the world agreed to write all email addresses in katakana, that would work just as well as ASCII, right? I have to ask this because a lot of people confuse "single international character set" with "single international character set that happens to be my one." If you'd also be okay with katakana, then you're consistent.
- rock_artist 4mo agoEnglish nor Latin characters are my native language. My language is also written from right-to-left. So if it was broadly used and what charset used by a reasonable amount of the population then yeah I’d of course learn it in early age as I had to learn English.
- swampangel 5mo ago> Maybe for some internal usages. but imagine someone from a country using different language and characters gives me a card with their email. It's now far less portable for me to use it. Those days, I surely could picture it and find the email most likely getting it right. It would be more portable for use with their peers who speak the same language, rather than requiring that everyone they want to communicate with in their own language and alphabet understands a second alphabet just for the addressing scheme.
- account42 5mo ago> It is relatively expensive to run Compared to sending a mail or to a customer not getting a mail they wanted? > Try to keep it as non-restrictive as possible. Something like ^[^@]+@[^@\s]+$, which only makes sure your user has input “something@something” Requiring a dot in the domain part is perfectly valid. It makes no sense to not validate that the address is in a format that you can actually send something to, which include a domain that you can look up and isn't specifically rejected by your MTA. > This belief will probably be more commonly held in the English-speaking world, but I’m curious: If you’re not in the Anglosphere, do you still expect emails to require ASCII latin characters? Yes, I do not trust Unicode with all its ambiguities and alternate forms to resolve to the same identifier on your and that I intended. ASCII-only email addresses are the norm everywhere I have seen.
- artistonn 5mo ago> It is relatively expensive to run yeah, that is a pretty bizarre claim, as if millions of accounts are created per second frankly this claim makes me think this article is LLM generated, because while the claim is technically correct, it's not a real concern
- echoangle 5mo agoMaybe I'm taking this too lightly but honestly, if you're playing games with your email address and then don't get my verification mail, it's kind of a you problem. If your email address contains non-printable unicode characters or an IP address as the domain part, I don't really care enough to add support just for you. And surely everyone who does this has a "normal" email as a fallback anyways.
- forgetfreeman 5mo ago"Regex is hard, regex wizardry is rare, and regex engine implementations are inconsistent. It’s very, very easy to accidentally get it wrong without realizing it." The what now? I'm struggling to take this seriously because a decade ago regex where common knowledge, like if you don't have a handle on this you should probably go get a job in marketing levels of common knowledge. Has the profession fallen off this far in ten years?
- naishoya 5mo agoSad truth: Yes. Yes, it has fallen off this far in the last ten years. If you look a little further back, say to 2006-ish it's far worse than that. Back then there were 'bright' middle-school ROV team members writing C and Ada+Spark for Arduino-board control-by-wire small craft to perform simulated ocean sample collection and tool manipulation tasks and winning in the unlimited class against university competition at international championships. Now the "Profession" consists of teams using ChatGPT to cheat on basic coding tasks and "make nudify" of famous people from their work machines.
- forgetfreeman 4mo agoWhat the actual fuck. It's not like we're talking about sed/awk fuckery or manual memory management. Regex syntax is a basic programming concept that is natively supported in most languages. Next you'll tell me these incompetents can't normalize database tables...
- greengreengrass 5mo agoI, too, get so frustrated by + addresses not working that I’ve configured my MDA to rewrite —- (double hyphen) to plus, and use this in spite on sites that dislike the + variant. I’ve made it impossible to /not/ host my own mail delivery infrastructure now if I want every address I’ve ever given out to still work. Although more recently I’ve moved to a catch all domain for throwaway, which is even better. It confuses agents on the phone though when I give my email address as {their company name}@mydomain.com Yeah, most people don’t understand how the ownership and control varies before and after the @ symbol.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoBeen wanting to do something similar my only hang up is coming up with a domain they wont butcher. When I got my passport I guess it must be OCR but they butchered my email completely.
- kgwxd 5mo ago> as {their company name}@mydomain.com People are still doing that? To prevent spam? To "catch" the company leaking/selling your address? Now the spammers know they can likely use anything@domain, and it'll get to your eyeballs in some capacity. Also, companies have no shame anymore, they don't care if you know.
- volemo 5mo agoBut the portion of us is so negligible that it’s not worth for the spammers to handle our edge case. :D
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- scottmcmac 5mo agoYeah, I do the same, but without the catchall for exactly that reason. If I start getting spam, the e-mail gets disabled.
- 5mo ago
- sylware 5mo agoMany email servers do forget about the email adresses with IP literals, that for people who are self-hosted without paying for DNS. mailbox@[x.x.x.x] and mailbox@[ipv6:...] (and probably without "ipv6" prefix once ipv4 is gone). This is stronger than SPF since the second the IP of the sending SMTP server does not match the IP in the "from" headers and the envelope, the email is dropped, not even going into spam. For instance, currently, if I send an email to a gmail slave, their parsers will ask for... a DNS PTR record, Oo "Geniuses" at work, or conveniently breaking all interop with small tech?
- mesrik 5mo agoThere is one more 'lie' missing and not included in that writing which only looks email addresses what is are limits of valid destination addresses. But if used as a senders source address there are even less limits. For example you can use a null address <> when sending. That has been used bit less these days than earlier. It's been used ages SMTP delivery status notifications, mail loop prevention and so where intentionally not much sense to expect anyone to reply. And all well known MTA's forward it and email clients handle it very well by disabling reply to that message. There is however a catch that anyone who thinks he would now start using it when he doesn't want any reply. Ever since IT Service Management (ITSM) and Service Desk software appeared, they have had issues with email coming from <> sender, because they like to always add received messages email addresses to database, where then someone handling would reply. I've been using only few, Service Now (SN) more lately and before Issue Tracker (IT), both didn't at least about year and half ago know how to handle null sender addresses. Both seemed to just discard or sort some trash bin those emails. With our SN sysadmin didn't find where those went in that system. But otherwise <> as a sender works great. And sure it would be great if those ITSM making folks would get this fixed, because when your postmaster, postmaster, etc. and such role-aliases are the quite often handled by ITSM software, there is good chance you don't get some important notifications from systems that rely on that null address sender. ps. Search Google: smtp and sender address as "<>" for more info incase needed.
- jrrv 5mo ago> In the year of our lord 2026, you can reasonably expect your users to know how to type their own email address Lies we tell ourselves about users.
- UltraSane 5mo agoI own a domain I use for email and I have it configured to deliver ANY address that ends with @mydomain. This works like + addressing on steroids. I can have website@mydomain or recipient@mydomainand it makes filtering much easier.
- alkonaut 5mo agoValidation to avoid mistakes is, as they point out, good. I'd even go so far as to extend it so that I reject those without any tld (without any dots) just because it's 99.999% a mistake and I don't care about the person who has ben@net. I'd also reject ip numbers. Next is the spicy take: I need to consider WHY I am gathering this email? If I'm gathering it for "marketing purposes" or any such cross correlation to other systems, then I'd also reject bob.smith+dontspamme@gmail.com. Or I'd keep both so you can do cross referencing on both the + address and the "raw" one.
- dathinab 5mo ago> Punycode [...] and the local-part was still limited to ASCII. the funny part is this is only half true The true part: Punycode has never be standardized for the localpart and as such taking a email address with non us-ascii characters in the local part and punycode encoding it is fundamentally wrong. But: Nothing prevents you to have a local part which "happens" to look like punycode and especially in the early SMTPUTF8 days many providers which did allow non-us-ascii email local parts automatically created an "alias" email address where the local part was punycode encoded. Nothing in the standard prevents this and as consequence punycode encoding a local part _might_ just happen to work for some subset of non-us-ascii emails.
- Const-me 5mo agoGood article. Worth noting C# standard library handles most of that complexity, no regular expressions required. Call System.Net.Mail.MailAddress.TryCreate, if successful read Address property to find the normalised address.
- dathinab 5mo ago> Note: I have struggled to verify this one, and it’s possible I’m actually misreading the RFC. Is correct, you can have quoted local parts and (I guess?) theoretically "foo"@mail and foo@mail should even be treated the same. But practically this is a dead feature and probably should be treated as non existing. AFIK `[<ip-address]` mails are used by some old data centers for delivering automatic generated "error" mails from unix server in a way which doesn't break when DNS is down. Also interestingly the `[..]` syntax has a generic extension hook, and that hook allows usage of @ characters. So technically a `foo@[custom:@@@@@@@@]` is a valid mail address, just no one knows how to deliver it ;). (And `custom` must be registered with IANA, theoretically).
- mjmas 5mo agoFrom my reading through the RFCs a few months ago the message and smtp envelope also have different rules for addresses, and the message allows the local-part to contain whitespace but the envelope doesn't.
- dathinab 5mo agoboth allow it but only if you use quoted text AFIK through the message does allow an additional display name (like `display name <email>`) which has it's own rules.
- ale42 5mo agoAn e-mail address can have multiple @ also for... source routing. Of course it doesn't make any sense nowadays, but it's technically allowed. RFC 5321 gives an example: @hosta.int,@jkl.org:userc@d.bar.org This is a valid e-mail address, with source-routing along two intermediate servers. I guess no sane server on the Internet will accept this, but you never know... (this said, I remember attempting this around 1996, when many servers were open relays, and the message was happily delivered after passing through 3-4 servers).
- tracker1 5mo agoI have a relatively good email address, and more than a handful of people who don't seem to understand email, just use my address... I've had payment confirmations from mlb.com orders, to tractor supply receipts and junk mail, to student loan paperwork. It's amazing how much garbage I see all because nobody actually confirms email address ownership before signing people up for crap. The worst is some foreign gambling site, I can't even log into to change the preferences and cancel the account. Though, I did deface then delete someone's dating profile once, who signed up on an app with my email...
- Xotic007 5mo ago[flagged]