Checking if email is valid

[Jon Ribbens]

On 2023-11-01, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 05:21, Simon Connah via Python-list
><python-list at python.org> wrote:
>> Could someone push me in the right direction please? I just want to
>> find out if a string is a valid email address.
>
> There is only one way to know that a string is a valid email address,
> and that's to send an email to it.
>
> What is your goal though? For example, if you're trying to autolink
> email addresses in text, you don't really care whether it's valid,
> only that it looks like an address.

There's often value in even only partially-effective checks though.
With an email address you can easily check to see if it has an "@",
and if the stuff after the "@" is a syntactically valid domain name.
You can also go a bit further and check to see if the domain has an
MX record, and if it doesn't then it is extremely unlikely that the
address is valid.