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👉@👈
Bottom-ass email address.
No ring for that.
17/21. Would have been 18 but the first example of spaces screwed me.
Two of my "favorite" features it didn't even touch on. You can have nested comments:
foo(one(two(three(four(five(six(seven)))))))@example.com
This will actually fail on that big email regex that gets copied around (originally from Mastering Regular Expressions in 1997), because it can only handle comment nesting to a depth of six. It is actually possible to do indefinite nesting now with recursive regex, but it was developed before that feature existed.
RFC822 also allows routing addresses through multiple servers:
<@foo.example.com@bar.example.com:123@example.com>
But this is almost always denied on modern email servers because it was abused by spammers.
I scored 13/21 on https://e-mail.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.
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Pretty much everything I've seen in e-mail is needlessly complicated and weird. So of course addresses are as well.
I got 13/21. I mean thats not bad 😄
If qoutes are removed and internal spaces are invalid, how could ":(){␣:|:&␣};:"@example.com be valid?
Presumably the space between quotes is "escaped", meaning it's supposed to act like any other character.
Yeah they're processed, but not passed through.
Not too sure, but a previous one says spaces are allowed in comments. I would assume the {} is similar?
I scored 16/21 on https://e-mail.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.
This was fun!
Edit: people, upvote the OP, not me
13/21 here. Mostly got hung up on several "this was valid in earlier RFC, and later removed" kind of situations. There are several where I picked the correct answer, but where I know many websites that won't accept it as valid, and that's not even the more esoteric ones.
Yeah I feel like the correct answer for anything obsoleted by a more recent RFC should be "Invalid".
Complaints about the quiz? Send them to 💩@💩
But they will work, and according to the spec, you have to build your system so that it can handle those cases. Obsolete doesn't mean incorrect or invalid, just a "you shouldn't do this any more".
Obsolete Syntax
Earlier versions of this standard allowed for different (usually more liberal) syntax than is allowed in this version. Also, there have been syntactic elements used in messages on the Internet whose interpretation have never been documented. Though some of these syntactic forms MUST NOT be generated according to the grammar in section 3, they MUST be accepted and parsed by a conformant receiver.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2822#section-4 page 29
Some of those "obsolete" things are outright blocked for specific reasons. For example, routing addresses through multiple servers. It was abused by spammers, so it's almost always denied these days.
Looks like this:
<@foo.example.com@bar.example.com:123@example.com>
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My top five from this (all valid):
- ":(){␣:|:&␣};:"@example.com # fork bomb
- 👉@👈 and poop@[💩]
- "@"@[@]
- c̷̨̈́i̵̮̅l̶̠̐͊͝ȁ̷̠̗̆̍̍n̷͖̘̯̍̈͒̅t̶͍͂͋ř̵̞͈̓ȯ̷̯̠-̸͚̖̟͋s̴͉̦̭̔̆̃͒û̵̥̪͆̒̕c̸̨̨̧̺̎k̵̼͗̀s̸̖̜͍̲̈́͋̂͠@example.com
- fed-up-yet@␣example.com␣ # ␣ = whitespace
TIL that emoji transcend spoilers.
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I had to make an email address just for paypal because those idiots don't accept subdomains in email addresses.
Pizza Hut doesn't allow dashes in the domain. This prevents me from ordering Pizza Hut with the email under my personal domain. This can be considered a feature.
THIS THING IS STUPID!!!!
Or it’s just me that is the fool. Thanks for sharing. I just learned about 9 new things.
All of the modern internet is built on the decaying carcasses of temporary solutions and things that seemed like a good idea at the moment but are now too widely used to change.
Tap for spoiler
Email addresses can have comments?!
Nested comments. RFC822 had a whole bunch of bad ideas in it, but nobody thought much of it at the time. Most programming languages don't even do nested comments, because they want to filter them out with a simple lexer before the grammar ever sees it.
14 / 21
This is the score you get when you answer "valid" for every question. Good job.
My score was lower 💀
Thanks to RFC 6532, Zalgo text is a-okay.
hmmm...
Yay! You're average! Time to start making plans for what you'll do when an LLM takes your job.
I already have plans.
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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