1577

I also reached out to them on Twitter but they directed me to this form. I followed up with them on Twitter with what happened in this screenshot but they are now ignoring me.

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[-] DmMacniel@feddit.de 324 points 11 months ago

When you insist on implementing your own email address validation...

[-] DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com 170 points 11 months ago

I have my own domain that uses a specific 2-letter ccTLD - it's a short domain variation of my surname (think "goo.gl" for Google). I've been using it for years, for my email.

Over those years, I have discovered an astonishing number of fuckheaded organisations whose systems insist I should have an email address with a "traditional" TLD at the end.

[-] stickmanmeyhem@lemmy.world 87 points 11 months ago

A few years back I bought a .family domain for my wife and I to have emails at ourlastname.family That lasted a week because almost every online service wouldn’t accept it. Now we have a .org

[-] CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world 44 points 11 months ago

Doesn't surprise me one bit. I've noticed that a lot of websites will only accept .com and a few will only accept email addresses from popular providers (Gmail, Hotmail, outlook, etc.)

My guess is that it's trying to reduce spam and fake account generation.

[-] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 58 points 11 months ago

My guess is that it's trying to reduce spam and fake account generation.

Thus preventing the growth of any small providers and further entrenching Microsoft, Google, Apple, and a handful of others as the only "viable" options.

[-] MBM@lemmings.world 4 points 11 months ago

Feels very relevant to the fediverse, with how people tend to compare it to email.

[-] Blamemeta@lemm.ee -5 points 11 months ago

Yeah, that's it pretty much.Like 99% of your legitimate users are going to be standard gmail/yahoo/hotmail/etc. You see a user from ten minute mail, it's probably some shady shit.

[-] CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago

Not necessarily shady.

I use 10 minute email if a merchant requires me enter an email account before seeing the total price on an item (including shipping). That's the most common pattern I've seen. My guess is that they want to ping you to complete the purchase.

Or a website might require free registration in order to view the content.

One place I use 10-minute email is actually Spotify. I didn't want to give them my Gmail address since your name is exposed to the world via their sharing API.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of bad uses for it as well. But privacy minded people use it too.

[-] acetanilide@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

ELI5 the bit about spotify's sharing API?

[-] CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

When you share your playlist or have Spotify hooked up to some other service like discord, it shows the name associated with the account.

And changing that name is not as straight forward as you might think.

Given the fact that it's shared so easily, I wouldn't be surprised if email addresses could be exposed with the right options.

[-] frozen@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 2 points 11 months ago

I went with .io specifically for this. It doesn't look special or anything, it's just cheaper than .org and accepted anywhere I've tried, so far.

[-] freehugs@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

What registrar do you use? Last time I checked .io domains where like 4x the price of a .org

[-] frozen@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 1 points 11 months ago

Namecheap. But it might also have to do with my domain not being very popular. Not sure.

[-] intensely_human@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago

Ah that makes sense. So far I’ve been using Namexpensive

[-] NightAuthor@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago
[-] lunarul@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

My first email address was @k.ro (a free email provider many many years ago) and many websites thought a valid second-level domain name cannot be just one letter

[-] laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 11 months ago

I'd love to know where they got the idea that the spec doesn't allow that...

[-] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago

Same. There are a lot of sites that just outright refuse to accept my email address that I’ve had for years, because it’s not a .com TLD.

[-] nybble41@programming.dev 3 points 11 months ago

CVS and E*Trade both refused to accept my fairly standard user@mydomain.info address during initial registration, but had no issue changing to that address once the account was created. It would be nice if their internal teams communicated a bit better.

[-] cley_faye@lemmy.world 48 points 11 months ago

The only useful email validation is "can I get an MX from that" and "does it understand what I'm saying in that SMTP". Anything else is someone that have too much free time.

[-] cashews_best_nut@lemmy.world 32 points 11 months ago

It's easier to Google "email regex [language]" and copy the first result from stack overflow.

[-] vithigar@lemmy.ca 42 points 11 months ago

Definitely a timesaver. Much faster to get incorrect email validation that way then to try building it yourself.

[-] Archer@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago

Skip the building step and go straight to pulling your hair out over why it’s not working! Efficiency!

[-] Katana314@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago

That probably lead to this exchange.

Stack Overflow is useful, but...it needs more than a little parsing for useful answers.

[-] felbane@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago

I know (hope) you're being facetious, because the objectively best way to do email validation is to send a fuckin email to the provided address.

[-] AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de 3 points 11 months ago

To be valid, the email just has to match [anything@anything]. ,🙃@localhost can be perfect legal if localhost supports utf8 in usernames.

[-] kamenoko@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago

Or implement a validator from a known good library.

[-] KickMeElmo@sopuli.xyz 32 points 11 months ago

I've encountered this because my domain has a hyphen in it. Very irritating.

[-] TheBat@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

@spider-man.net?

[-] aard@kyu.de 22 points 11 months ago

I'm not aware of any correct email validations. I'm still looking for something accepting a space in the localpart.

Also a surprising number of sites mess with the casing of the localpart. Don't do that - many mailservers do accept arbitrary case, but not all. MyName@example.com and myname@example.com are two different mail addresses, which may point to the same mailbox if you are lucky.

[-] CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world 25 points 11 months ago

The only correct regex for email is: .+@.+

So long as the address has a local part, the at sign, and a hostname, it's a valid email address.

Whether it goes somewhere is the tricky part.

[-] xantoxis@lemmy.world 24 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Sorry, this is not a correct regex for an email address.

Sending using mail on a local unix system? You only need the local part.

STOP VALIDATING NAMES AND EMAIL ADDRESSES. Send a verification email. Full stop. Don't do anything else. You really want to do this anyway, because it's a defense against bots.

[-] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

*Gasp* the registration is coming from inside the colo!

[-] Turun@feddit.de 5 points 11 months ago

I think it's fair to prevent users from causing mail sent to your internal systems. It probably won't cause any issues getting mail to the machine inbox for (no domain name), but it reasonably makes security uneasy.

[-] xantoxis@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

The statement I was responding to was "This is the correct email regex". There is no correct email regex. Don't parse emails with a regex. You probably don't need to parse emails at all.

[-] elrik@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Yes, but no. Pretty much every application that accepts an email address on a form is going to turn around and make an API call to send that email. Guess what that API is going to do when you send it a string for a recipient address without an @ sign? It's going to refuse it with an error.

Therefore the correct amount of validation is that which satisfies whatever format the underlying API requires.

For example, AWS SES requires addresses in the form UserName@[SubDomain.]Domain.TopLevelDomain along with other caveats. If the application is using SES to send emails, I'm not going to allow an input that doesn't meet those requirements.

[-] xantoxis@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

Therefore the correct amount of validation is that which satisfies whatever format the underlying API requires.

You mean the validation which the underlying API will perform on its own? You don't need to do it.

[-] elrik@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

I disagree. You should have validation at each layer, as it's easier to handle bad inputs and errors the earlier they are caught.

It's especially important in this case with email because often one or more of the following comes into play when you're dealing with an email input:

  • You're doing more than sending an email (for ex, creating a record for a new user).
  • The UI isn't waiting for you to send that email (for ex, it's handled through a queue or some other background process).
  • The API call to send an email has a cost (both time and money).
  • You have multiple email recipients (better hope that external API error tells you which one failed).

I'm not suggesting that validation of an email should attempt to be exhaustive, but a well thought-out implementation validates all user inputs. Even the underlying API in this example is validating the email you give it before trying to send an email through its own underlying API.

Passing obvious garbage inputs down is just bad practice.

[-] tomaThomas@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago
[-] laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 11 months ago

And this right here is a great example of why simple basic RegEx is rarely adequate

At the very least, should be something like

^[^@\s]+@([^@\s.]+\.)+[^@\s.]+$

I'm like 99% sure I missed at least a few cases there, and will say "please don't use this for anything production"

[-] jpeps@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Here's two: you can have multiple @s forming relays in an email address, and you can also break all the rules around dots and spaces if you put quotes around the local part, eg ".sarah.."@emails.com

[-] laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 11 months ago

And this is exactly why I wouldn't do my own, I had no idea either of those were legal/possible

[-] jpeps@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

To be fair nor do most email providers! It's in the spec, though.

[-] uid0gid0@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

You should be able to double quote the local part and use the space. "like this"@email.net. Good luck getting that through a validator though.

[-] bjorney@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

There isn't a perfect one afaik - this one is apparently the closest you can get (https://emailregex.com) (?:[a-z0-9!#$%&'+/=?^_{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_{|}~-]+)|"(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21\x23-\x5b\x5d-\x7f]|\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])")@(?:(?:a-z0-9?.)+a-z0-9?|[(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?).){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?|[a-z0-9-][a-z0-9]:(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21-\x5a\x53-\x7f]|\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])+)])

[-] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 9 points 11 months ago

When you insist on implementing your own ~~email address validation~~ regex string...

this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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