Comments on: “Please Enter A Valid Email Address”

By: MD:SAFIN HAYDER (SHUVO)

MD:SAFIN HAYDER (SHUVO) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:45:00 +0000

read

By: TheresNoEscapingSpam

TheresNoEscapingSpam — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 19:18:00 +0000

We can thank Yahoo for aiding and abetting spammers with the feature of “disposable email accounts”
To add the email address to the spam portion of mail options is useless because once the address is added the spammer has already deleted that email address from their account.

By: Guest

Guest — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 06:47:00 +0000

tutheck5@yahoo.com

By: jeremy

jeremy — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 22:16:00 +0000

jzs3752@comcast.net

By: George dinkel

George dinkel — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 01:40:41 +0000

i want to join ecards

By: mark09

mark09 — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 10:56:27 +0000

makhust09@gmail.com

By: mark09

mark09 — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 05:56:27 +0000

makhust09@gmail.com

By: eric

eric — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:33:11 +0000

This happens a lot using music download
freemusicconnection.com
Or EZtracks
Both say gmail is invalid. How can I verify?

By: linsenk

linsenk — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:12:01 +0000

I agree with you. Every entry should have a warning asking if you really did enter the email address or other information correctly. Then, it should let you simply enter it and then if you entered your information wrong, it is your fault. I agree with your example of your name being one initial and not being accepted as a first name on many websites. When designers design their websites and use forms, they should allow more than one ideal entry. Everyone around the world has different information and we cannot expect to have every user to enter their information in one specific way. Designers should be flexible and meet the needs of the users in the best way possible. In this case, having a warning and a confirmation check would do the trick!

By: J Todd Bennett

J Todd Bennett — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:20:47 +0000

My first name is also one letter… and Intuit's Tax Cut software tells me it's an invalid name. Nothing worse than a piece of software telling you that your own name is invalid!

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:11:05 +0000

"Gmail has this really neat feature where you can append “+[foo]” to your email handle..."

So what?

IE has this neat feature where you can enclose IE-only content in specialized HTML comments. That doesn't mean it's an appropriate implementation. So what?

Rather than pointing to a currently-popular email provider and a "neat feature" they support, you should point to the document that defines the standard, which I believe is RFC 2822 for email. Section 3.2.4 defines "+" (amongst many other characters that are likely considered "invalid" by a lot of form validators) as part of "atext", which is part of the "dot-atom", which is part of the "local-part", the part before the @.

I'd bet that the developer of that validation system probably just wrote a regex based on what they were familiar with in terms of email addresses. That's what happens when you don't bother to consult the standard.

However, along with what Keijo said, RFCs at times can be very extensive in their specifications -- and it's always possible to miss something, get something wrong, etc with such complex regexes.

WtBL, what's standard today may be obsoleted by tomorrow... but for practicality's sake, we can't just sit still for fear of breaking a future standard, can we? Though I like the validator-override method you mentioned :)

Aside: re: WtBL's one-letter FN... is there a standard format for names? :3

By: Keijo S.

Keijo S. — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:19:08 +0000

I guess most of the time improper validation code is the sad result of laziness or simply just not giving a damn. However, accepting all peculiarities allowed by RFC 2822 would probably result in accepting a lot of typos, too. This guy has come up with a rather nice idea of a three-valued validation instead of the usual accept/reject logic: <http://www.markussipila.info/pub/emailvalidator...>. I haven’t seen this idea elsewhere but I think it’s pretty good.

By: Paul Sherman

Paul Sherman — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:06:26 +0000

Excellent points, and I certainly appreciate the perspective! Thanks for providing that feedback.

By: WtBL

WtBL — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:00:59 +0000

One problem with writing "accurate validation code" is that, even with standards, what is the definition of everything that will be valid? What's standard today my just become a subset of what's standard tomorrow.

I think the best solution would be for a lot of these validation checks to be warning+confirm checks. For example, "that doesn't look like a valid email address, are you sure that's what you want to enter?" And give the user a chance to override the validation filter which may be broken. At that point, if they don't get email's it's their own fault.

I have a single letter of a first name. I hate that so many systems don't allow a 1 letter first name. It's my legal name (even if I don't go by it). Some systems can be tricked into working if I enter a period after it making it look like an initial, but some still insist on more than two characters or that a first name not have anything that's not a letter in it. if they were to adopt a model of saying, "hey, it looks like you might have missed a few letters, are you sure that's what you want to enter?" it would avoid the problem.