On Mar 11, 2004, at 3:40 PM, Timothy Binder wrote:
On Mar 11, 2004, at 2:59 PM, Neil Herber wrote:
A disadvantage I have found with this approach is that some Java based email address verifiers on web forms do not accept addresses containing hyphens.
Many web-based email address "checkers" are brain dead -- Java, JavaScript, PHP, etc. (I know, I had to fix a web site that had one.) A lot of people assume that email addresses can only have letters & numbers and underscores. Sometimes dashes or periods. This has never been true -- sendmail for a very long time has allowed addresses of the form "[EMAIL PROTECTED]", which most of these "checkers" will reject as "invalid".
The fact is that RFCs allow for virtually anything in the local portion of the email address. It was an explicit design choice, since the Internet connected so many types of email systems. (Anyone remember bang (!) addressing?)
In fact, it is not possible to write a regular expression that can check an arbitrary e-mail address, as defined in RFC 822, for validity. Anyone that claims they've done it has more or less proved that they don't really understand the problem.
Charles Yeomans
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