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Comment by patrickg | Hacker News Reader

I have a sign-up page with one email field. I get many errors because people (mostly younger people that probably don't use email regularly) type in incorrect email addresses (leave out the '@', use : instead of . and so on).

I wonder if this double entry would make them think twice? And probably these people don't know about CTRL-C/CTRL-V so they have to enter the address twice.

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Some very basic client side validation would be your friend. Just check for the existence of an @ symbol, at least.

This. Another experiment worth conducting is displaying their email address as a checkbox near the submit button:

(x) foobar@example.com is my email address where I can confirm my account

[Create account button]

Checking for @ (and some other basic stuff) would be ok.

I don't want to confuse users with more checkboxes/displays than necessary. Interesting experiment? Yes probably, but I would need more data than I have now to get meaningful results.

or use HTML5 <input type="email">

> Just check for the existence of an @ symbol, at least.

"At least"? That's pretty much all the client-side validation you can do. The next step is sending an email to it.

The specification of what kind of email address is valid or invalid is horrendously complex. I've seen too many sites reject perfectly valid email addresses. Don't do this. If it contains an @, try mailing to it. Let the user respond to that email somehow, and you've got the only reliable email validation and verification that's possible.

I get many errors because people (mostly younger people that probably don't use email regularly) type in incorrect email addresses (leave out the '@', use : instead of . and so on).

While I've heard of this trend, I find it quite surprising.

Registration for almost any website/app/service needs a valid email address. And. although IM/Twitter/FB take care of informal communication [can you get a Twitter account without email?], there are plenty of cases where email still works better than the alternatives. How old are these younger people?

They are mostly in 9th grade. I don't know their age, but perhaps around 14-15?

Someone doesn't know what an email address is supposed to look like. They fill the first email field. Now they still don't know what an email address is supposed to look like, but they do know that the "confirm email address" field is supposed to look exactly like the "email address" field.

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