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Isn't this pointless with the wholesale of TLDs?

Reading the article, the main use for the TLD check is to see if you have a typo, and if so suggest a correction - rather than automatically correcting the typo for you. Which I agree could be useful for the big email providers. (e.g you type gmial and it suggests a correction of gmail).

Also sometimes you don't even need the TLD:

user@myhostname, is a valid email address, and yet it's rejected by a lot of libraries.

Just because it's a valid address doesn't mean a real user is going to sign up for an account using a domain without a TLD.

Perhaps users are aware of relative domain names and addressing. You even see this on a service like gmail's login. A user with the address example@gmail.com doesn't have to enter '@gmail.com' when logging in - just 'example'. But actually either will do. Further it's not totally clear for a user what to enter here. Is a username/id is the same thing as an email address or not.

My aunt swears blind that an email address without the name in double quotes and the domainy bit is not a correct email address. She types the lot out.

It's certainly valid address, but why would you want to input that as an email address into public-facing service that you do not operate?

Perhaps I do operate it. Can be very useful on say a dev box.

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