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Comment by gaur | Hacker News Reader

What I'm about to say is more general than regex, but can online services please stop trying to validate my email address?

If I gave you an email address that you think is invalid, rest assured I did it for a reason. I'm not an imbecile: I know how to type my address correctly (especially when you make me type it twice). For all the imbeciles who don't know how to type their address correctly, the phone system still works fine.

I may have given you my real email address with a plus-sign for a filter. Don't tell me it's invalid.

I may have given you a fake email address, because I know you're just going to spam me. If you tell me it's invalid, I'll either spend an extra few minutes cooking up a better fake email address, or I'll leave your site.

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https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/please-stop-verifying-my-email-ad...

I wrote something about this a while ago. I'm no wordsmith but it fits here.

But, statistically speaking, it probably is an imbecile.

These systems aren't optimizing for someone like you trying to be clever. They're trying to handle the more common cases of someone typing a street address in the wrong field or forgetting the ".com" or putting in an HTTP address or some such.

They're trying to catch that, not every possible pedantically legal string you could throw at it. Maybe they could improve the validator, or maybe they'd rather be spending programmers' time on things with actual business value.

The sum total of imbeciles may well represent a bigger market than the sum total of people like you.

Agreed. I find things like "youdont@needmyemail.com" usually work, and then if they ever bother to read what’s in their database they may get a hint.

kindlysodoff@mailinator.com is nice, and actually works for that one activation link you have to click.

I know it can be frustrating, it's happened to me too, but the reality is that email validation generally isn't for you. It's for the 99% of other people who would greatly appreciate the heads up that they've typed "something@yahoocom" or "Boys@MenFan1@whatever.com" and it's probably not what they meant to type.

Now we can talk about HOW validation is implemented, and I think it would be completely fair to raise a warning: "Hey, did you mean to enter this?" instead of "sorry, nope." when non-trivial addresses are encountered.

But it's extremely rare for a typo to result in an invalid email address, contrived examples notwithstanding.

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