I scored 16/21 on https://e-mail.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.
This was fun!
Edit: people, upvote the OP, not me
13/21 here. Mostly got hung up on several “this was valid in earlier RFC, and later removed” kind of situations. There are several where I picked the correct answer, but where I know many websites that won’t accept it as valid, and that’s not even the more esoteric ones.
Yeah I feel like the correct answer for anything obsoleted by a more recent RFC should be “Invalid”.
But they will work, and according to the spec, you have to build your system so that it can handle those cases. Obsolete doesn’t mean incorrect or invalid, just a “you shouldn’t do this any more”.
Obsolete Syntax
Earlier versions of this standard allowed for different (usually more liberal) syntax than is allowed in this version. Also, there have been syntactic elements used in messages on the Internet whose interpretation have never been documented. Though some of these syntactic forms MUST NOT be generated according to the grammar in section 3, they MUST be accepted and parsed by a conformant receiver.Some of those “obsolete” things are outright blocked for specific reasons. For example, routing addresses through multiple servers. It was abused by spammers, so it’s almost always denied these days.
Looks like this:
<@foo.example.com@bar.example.com:123@example.com>Well shit, yeah, that “MUST be accepted and parsed” is pretty explicit. That sucks. What is even the point of revising standards? How the fuck do we ever get rid of some of these bad ideas?
I got 14/21
Me too and it said that is the amount you’d get if you just picked “valid” for every response. Lmao
Samsies
Yay! Same. But only because I’ve already heard of some email craziness before.
Don’t tell me what to do!
yay 16/21 club
I don’t think it really matters what the standard is, because you’ll be completely limited by some 25 year old bit of Regex from Stack Overflow that every web developer ever has implemented into their form sanity checks.
The main one that gets passed around will match the weirdness fine. In fact, it probably matches things you don’t want, anyway.
A signin/registration form really only needs to do sanity checks to get rid of obviously bad addresses. You’ll have to send a round-trip email confirmation message to make sure the email is real, anyway, so why bother going into great detail? Just check that there’s an ‘@’ symbol and a dot in the domain. Most of the rest is wanking off.
Question 5 is incorrect,
name@exampleis a fully valid email address, even after RFC 2822The spec of RFC 2822 defines an address (3.4.1) as:
local-part "@" domaindomainis defined (3.4.1) as:domain = dot-atom / domain-literal / obs-domaindot-atomis defined (3.2.4) as:dot-atom = [CFWS] dot-atom-text [CFWS] dot-atom-text = 1*atext *("." 1*atext)1meaning at least 1 alphanumeric character, followed by*("." 1*atext)meaning at least 0"." 1*atext
If tomorrow, google decided to use its
googletop-level domain as an email domain, it would be perfectly valid, as could any other company owning top-level domainsGoogle even owns a
gmailTLD so I wouldn’t even be surprised if they decided to use itI didn’t understand this one. How do you have a no dot domain? Like you need to distinguish from example.com or example.wtf
Edit: do you mean if you own
.googleyou can have youremail@googleaddress?Yes, the top-level domain is still just a domain. I’m not aware of any public Internet services which are reachable from a TLD directly, and it’s strongly discouraged by ICANN, but there isn’t any technical limitation preventing e.g. someone at Verisign from setting up
example@com.you could also send mails within your local network, the hostname just has to resolve and have a mail service running
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Bottom-ass email address.
No ring for that.
Two of my “favorite” features it didn’t even touch on. You can have nested comments:
foo(one(two(three(four(five(six(seven)))))))@example.comThis will actually fail on that big email regex that gets copied around (originally from Mastering Regular Expressions in 1997), because it can only handle comment nesting to a depth of six. It is actually possible to do indefinite nesting now with recursive regex, but it was developed before that feature existed.
RFC822 also allows routing addresses through multiple servers:
<@foo.example.com@bar.example.com:123@example.com>But this is almost always denied on modern email servers because it was abused by spammers.
The routing feature is so cursed XD
I don’t validate emails, I test them.
That’s your email? OK, what did we send it? if we couldn’t send to it or the user can’t read it there’s no reason to accept it.
OK, maybe I do some light validation first, but I don’t trust the email address just because it’s email-address-shaped.
What kind of “light validation”? I’m guessing a
.*@.*regex match.Almost correct. ^.+@.+$
Too hard to validate properly to be worth it. Even if it is technically valid that’s insufficient. It must also work, and the easiest way to test that is to use it and verify that the user got what we sent.
Hooray, you have better security than Apple, who won’t let me use my own email because some idiot in Australia used it first.
I don’t validate emails, I test them.
Hooray! You get a gold star.
OK, maybe I do some light validation first,
I hope your “validation” does nothing more than show a warning that the user is allowed to ignore.
I have seen too many systems built by people who think they know what’s valid or not before and after the
sign*, and they are almost always dead wrong. In the worst cases, such systems accept an unusual-looking address and claim to send the expected verification message, but never actually send it. Of course, these systems won’t work for some people, and since none of their online docs or support staff know why, those people will be locked out of using the system and funneled into bottomless pit of misery if they try. Please don’t build broken garbage like this.*Fun fact: Not so terribly long ago, even the
sign didn’t have to be present. Some email addresses were bang paths. I’m not sure if any of these are still in use, but it wouldn’t shock me to learn that they are.
I scored 13/21 on https://e-mail.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.
My top five from this (all valid):
- ":()␣:;:"@example.com # fork bomb
- 👉@👈 and poop@[💩]
- “@”@[@]
- c̷̨̈́i̵̮̅l̶̠̐͊͝ȁ̷̠̗̆̍̍n̷͖̘̯̍̈͒̅t̶͍͂͋ř̵̞͈̓ȯ̷̯̠-̸͚̖̟͋s̴͉̦̭̔̆̃͒û̵̥̪͆̒̕c̸̨̨̧̺̎k̵̼͗̀s̸̖̜͍̲̈́͋̂͠@example.com
- fed-up-yet@␣example.com␣ # ␣ = whitespace
Spoilers!
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I had to make an email address just for paypal because those idiots don’t accept subdomains in email addresses.
Pizza Hut doesn’t allow dashes in the domain. This prevents me from ordering Pizza Hut with the email under my personal domain. This can be considered a feature.
Also as the registrant of one of those new fancy TLDs, much like the owner of this website (email.wtf), their own email addresses will fail those stupid email validation checks that only believe in example@example.[com|net|org]
Shitty websites will fail “example@email.wtf”, guaranteed - despite it being 100% valid AND potentially live.
Source - I have a “.family” domain for my email server. Totally functional, but some shitty websites refuse to believe it.
Yeah I have a .engineering for my biz. I also registered mycompanyengineering.com to get through places that won’t take the new TLDs.
Usually banks.
Seems like a weird choice as the primary TLD.
I’d switch it just to reduce the annoying typing hassle and to avoid misspelling.It’s already unusual if I say “My email is givenName@LastName.eu”
And that trips so many persons.
First: I have my own domain
Second: It’s not gmail, apple or a local provider
Third: The TLD isnt.deor.combut.eu
I have plenty of website reject even my fairly vanilla [email]+XYZ@ address add–ons
I’m not sure I blame the sites. The spec is so complex that it’s not even possible to know which regex to use
const emailRegExp = /^[\w.!#$%&'*+/=?^`{|}~-]+@[a-z\d-]+(?:\.[a-z\d-]+)*$/i;per the HTML specification. From https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development/Extensions/Forms/Form_validation#validating_forms_without_a_built-in_api
That’s one very random place to find that. There are a lot of different one and there is no way we all just agree to use that one.
Look art his site that shows a more complete and (in theory) official website. While also explaining that there is no regex that is perfect
(Compete regex for the lazy)
(?:\[a-z0-9!#$%&'\*+/=?^\_\`{|}\~-]+(?:\\.\[a-z0-9!#$%&'\*+/=?^\_\`{|}\~-]+)\*|"(?:\[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21\x23-\x5b\x5d-\x7f]|\\\\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])\*")@(?:(?:\[a-z0-9]\(?:\[a-z0-9-]\*\[a-z0-9])?\\.)+\[a-z0-9]\(?:\[a-z0-9-]\*\[a-z0-9])?|\\\[(?:(?:25\[0-5]|2\[0-4]\[0-9]|\[01]?\[0-9]\[0-9]?)\\.){3}(?:25\[0-5]|2\[0-4]\[0-9]|\[01]?\[0-9]\[0-9]?|\[a-z0-9-]\*\[a-z0-9]:(?:\[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21-\x5a\x53-\x7f]|\\\\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])+)\\])MDN isn’t a very random place?
No. But it’s on the form validation topic.
The spec is so complex that it’s not even possible to know which regex to use
Yes. Almost like a regex is not the correct tool to use, and instead they should use a well-tested library function to validate email addresses.
Exactly! But its not obvios. So most of those shitty websites don’t even know they have a problem.
Then there are also people ignoring it on purpose. I once read a reddit comment saying 'well of your address looks like “John wick 🐶❤️”@2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 I don’t event want your email in my DB because oit will break something
I have a feeling, the ones codapine is stating, didn’t even care to half-read the spec and just went with what they knew from experience.
Maybe they didn’t even know there was a spec.
Maybe they asked ChatGPT for the regex.
I have a spam collecting address @freemail.hu , the domain is live and working since 96, sometimes it’s not accepted, because it’s not Gmail I guess
Thanks to RFC 6532, Zalgo text is a-okay.
hmmm…
Yay! You’re average! Time to start making plans for what you’ll do when an LLM takes your job.
I already have plans.
13 right answers and I didn’t expect so many lol
I’ll never validate some of the 💩 I’ve learnt today.
13 here too
Pretty much everything I’ve seen in e-mail is needlessly complicated and weird. So of course addresses are as well.
Tap for spoiler
Email addresses can have comments?!
Nested comments. RFC822 had a whole bunch of bad ideas in it, but nobody thought much of it at the time. Most programming languages don’t even do nested comments, because they want to filter them out with a simple lexer before the grammar ever sees it.
I lost it at the fork bomb. I mean I hit valid because there was no way it was on the and not valid, but there’s no way i’d have expected that. after that I just kept guessing the most stupid answer and did pretty well
