Checking if email is valid

[Grant Edwards]

On 2023-11-04, Michael Torrie via Python-list <python-list at python.org> wrote:
> On 11/4/23 02:51, Simon Connah via Python-list wrote:
>
>> Wow. I'm half tempted to make a weird email address to see how many
>> websites get it wrong.

In my experience, they don't have to be very weird at all.

>> Thank you for the link.
>
> Nearly all websites seem to reject simple correct email addresses
> such as myemail+sometext at example.domain.  I like to use this kind of
> email address when I can to help me filter out the inevitable spam
> that comes from companies selling off my address even after claiming
> they won't.

I've always suspected that's intentional. They refuse those sorts of
e-mail addresses because they know that's what they are used for. If
they allowed "plus suffixed" e-mail addresses, then all the crap they
want to send to you would go into /dev/null where it belongs -- and we
can't have that!

> So I suspect that nearly all websites are going to reject other
> kinds of weird email addresses you can create that are actually
> correct.

Definitely. Syntactic e-mail address "validation" is one of the most
useless and widely broken things on the Interwebs.  People who do
anything other than require an '@' (and optionally make you enter the
same @-containing string twice) are deluding themselves.

--
Grant