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Comment by JacobJans | Hacker News Reader

I do a lot of optin email. Here are some examples of bounced emails that people use to sign up:

* somename@gmail.co

* anothername@yhoo.com

* myemail@hotmial.com

These are very common errors that occur nearly every day. A regex isn't going to help here. What does help, is a notification that asks people to verify what they typed –– if the email contains an obvious, common error, such as one listed above.

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Asking to retype though being a simple solution IMHO is asking for a lot. Consider a user who uses mobile phone, even copy paste is annoying. Validating if the mail box exists and that it does not belong to a provider like mailinator and then sending a confirmation link to them works. While its not perfect, it does address lot of other concerns without sacrificing user experience.

Also, asking to retype makes sense for a password where you can't visually verify that you typed what you expected. For an email address, it's pointless and frustrating. Send an email. If it bounces or doesn't get verified in a timely fashion, it was a mistake and delete the account.

And the user never discovers their mistake.

They'll discover they don't get a validation email.

That's just what happens when you give bad contact information.

I don't think having users always retype the address is what the parent post suggested, but to look for common errors and if one is found prompt for verification.

And as soon as you invoke copy-paste the second confirmation field loses all value anyways.

Why do you care if the address is for mailinator?

mailcheck [1] is great for this, especially when supplemented with your users' most popular email domains.

[1] https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck

I'm planning a follow-up post with all sorts of real validation just like what you mention here. Can't take too long to build an array of 'probably typos'. I wish had access to logs of failed emails.

But I want a hot mial!

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