Validating an email address

[Mike Meyer]

Tom Anderson <twic at urchin.earth.li> writes:
> On Sat, 10 Dec 2005, Ben Finney wrote:
>> Please, don't attempt to "validate" the local-part. It's not up to
>> you to decide what the receiving MTA will accept as a local-part,
> Absolutely not - it's up to the IETF, and their decision is recorded
> in RFC 2822.

Wrong. The IETF dictates what your MTA *must* accept, not what it will
accept. It's perfectly legal to accept more than what the IETF says is
legal. In fact the rule of thumb for interoperability (on the off
chance that anyone still cares about such) is "be generous in what you
accept, and strict in what you send", so you're even encouraged to
accept more than what the IETF says you have to.

If you didn't generate the address, you have no way of knowing if the
the receiving MTA will accept it or not without actually trying
it. Rejecting an address because you don't like it could break
perfectly functional email addresses.

          <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.