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Comment by jeff18 | Hacker News Reader

I would estimate about 0.25% of people will make a typo like "@homail.com" or "@gmial.com"

Multiply that by say, 130,000 people, and you are dealing with 325 people who don't receive their download, etc. and are not happy!

I think what would be really awesome is a regex that catches these common typos and warns the user immediately.

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True, but you have to balance that against the small but nonzero number of people put off by an extra text field. Plus, I would find email repetition more annoying if I didn't always do Cmd-A/Cmd-C/Tab/Cmd-V, and in this case the repeated field won't catch any errors.

The fact that you know the shortcuts for select all, copy, and paste puts you in the top percentile of users. Most people don't even know that's possible, and certainly not with keyboard shortcuts.

(The point being that for most users the faster approach that requires less thinking is to type it twice. Sometimes I do things the "slow" or "long" way when coding because it doesn't require a mental shift from the task at hand.)

That's true. My main point was the first one. The second point was mainly to illustrate that annoyance isn't hypothetical; I'm annoyed by an extra text box.

I agree they are annoying. I guess I'm just less annoyed than you are. Cmd-a Cmd-c Tab Cmd-v has a very negligible impact on the amount of keystrokes I make in a day. Typing my address again doesn't even make a real difference now that I think about it, 3 seconds or so.

Have you ever abandoned a sign-up because of the e-mail confirmation?

Yes, there are many sites of all genres that don't require this. Don't underestimate it, do an A/B test sometime.

The point being that for most users the faster approach that requires less thinking is to type it twice.

Spoken like a touch-typist with a short email address. I feel confident in claiming that annabelle.t.johnson@woodandplaster.co.uk will be looking for that copypaste button. It's not like copypaste is a new technological innovation - it's practically the most used feature of personal computing, after backspace.

Good point. sami.samhuri@gmail.com takes me 3 seconds but might take someone else 10 seconds. Thanks for the perspective.

Copy & Paste are one of the most used menu items in Firefox (only bookmarks are used more):

http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2010/03/23/visualizing-usage...

You'd need something more along the lines of a spell checking algorithm to do that sanely. Don't abuse regular expressions for things they're not good at.

Yeah, that python script (from StackOverflow London - http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html) that learned what was correct from a large number of words would work. Analyse your DB of users' email address url (after @) that have registered fully and provide a "Did you mean.." type response if a new users email url was not found and something close (within 2 alterations) to it was.

To let users revisit their email addresses without adding a second field for copy-pasting, Russ Unger of UserGlue and Jonathan Knoll found a nice solution:

Display the email address on the submit button: http://www.userglue.com/blog/2009/09/09/solving-the-repeat-e...

Also try out the live examples: http://infinityplusone.com/experiments/email-repeat/version5

Regexes take care of the syntax. The semantics still have to be checked by a human.

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