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Comment by arianvanp | Hacker News Reader

/@/ usually does the job for me... hehe

Unfortunately many devs try to be smarter and my something+website_name@gmail.com is usually rejected as incorrect :/

This a pain because gmail allows you to append anything you want after the + and it will still reach your inbox.

For example - If your email address is johnsmith@gmail.com you can have mail sent to johnsmith+stopspamming@gmail.com and it will go into your inbox.

http://lifehacker.com/144397/instant-disposable-gmail-addres...

Ironically, after many years this is still being rejected as incorrect by the Google Apps admin dashboard for Groups...

I use a slightly more complex variation of that:

   ^.+@.+\..+$

Works wonders. I think when testing the addresses on a sign up form, we got only 0.5% that we couldn't relay too which was a pretty good hit rate.

It looks to me like you're neglecting email addresses from <http://ai./>. The 'ai' TLD does have an MX record.

Yes; I get told that every time I mention it :-)

I would suspect that anyone whose email did not match that regex would have such a miserable time generally getting it rejected as invalid left right and centre that they would just cave in and get a simpler one that did.

That's pretty good. I learned from Rails Tutorial to use this one:

    /\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-.]+\.[a-z]+\z/i

It's worked for me when I needed to use it.

Hope you don't have international customers, because http://äöüß.de is a totally legal domain these days.

Very true. My simplified one on the parent comment of that one makes no attempt to involve Unicode or character ranges for precisely that reason!

My regexp: [^@]+@[^@]+

That fails on the perfectly valid email address: "Foo@bar"@example.com

Although if that's your email address, you deserve everything you get ;)

If you want to verify if an email address is valid, just ask your mail server if it is capable of sending mail to it:

  root@flan:~# /usr/sbin/sendmail -bv '"Foo@bar"@example.com'
  "Foo@bar"@example.com verified
  root@flan:~#

Does it fail? I don't see ^ or $.

I assumed it was anchored and he missed those off.

The regexp looks for exactly one '@'-character preceded and followed by at least one character that's not an '@'-character. Or, in other words, it does not allow for an email address with more than one '@'-character.

The point of the post was that since the regexp doesn't include start or end of a string it would still succeed:

"Foo@bar"@example.com -> "Foo@bar"

I don't need those “perfectly valid” email addresses. Person who create such addresses potentially dangerous.

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