Checking if email is valid

[Jon Ribbens]

On 2023-11-06, D'Arcy Cain <darcy at VybeNetworks.com> wrote:
> On 2023-11-05 06:48, Jon Ribbens via Python-list wrote:
>> Sometimes I think that these sorts of stupid, wrong, validation are the
>> fault of idiot managers. When it's apostrophes though I'm suspicious
>> that it may be idiot programmers who don't know how to prevent SQL
>> injection attacks without just saying "ban all apostrophes everywhere".
>> Or perhaps it's idiot "security consultancies" who make it a tick-box
>> requirement.
>
> https://xkcd.com/327/

Indeed. My point is that the correct way to solve this problem is not
to declare vast swathes of valid inputs verboten, but to *not execute
user input as code*. Controversial, I know.

>>> OK, now that I am started, what else?  Oh yah.  Look at your credit
>>> card.  The number has spaces in it.  Why do I have to remove them.  If
>>> you don't like them then you are a computer, just remove them.
>> 
>> Yes, this is also very stupid and annoying. Does nobody who works for
>> the companies making these sorts of websites ever use their own, or
>> indeed anyone else's, website?
>
> Gotta wonder for sure.  It could also be the case of programmers 
> depending on user input but the users insist on living with the bugs 
> and/or working around them.  We made crash reporting dead simple to 
> report on and still users didn't bother.  We would get the traceback and 
> have to guess what the user was doing.

That was another thing that I used to find ridiculous, but seems to have
improved somewhat in recent years - website error pages that said "please
contact us to let us know about this error". I'm sorry, what? You want
me to contact you to tell you about what your own website is doing? How
does that make any sense? Websites should be self-reporting problems.

(Not least because, as you say, people are absolutely terrible at
reporting problems, with almost all bug reports reading effectively as
"I was doing something that I'm not going to tell you and I as expecting
something to happen which I'm not going to tell you, but instead
something else happened, which I'm also not going to tell you".)