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

THIS THING IS STUPID!!!!

Or it’s just me that is the fool. Thanks for sharing. I just learned about 9 new things.

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.

Question 5 is incorrect, name@example is a fully valid email address, even after RFC 2822

The spec of RFC 2822 defines an address (3.4.1) as:

local-part "@" domain

domain is defined (3.4.1) as:

domain = dot-atom / domain-literal / obs-domain

dot-atom is defined (3.2.4) as:

dot-atom = [CFWS] dot-atom-text [CFWS]
dot-atom-text = 1*atext *("." 1*atext)

1*atext meaning at least 1 alphanumeric character, followed by *("." 1*atext) meaning at least 0 "." 1*atext

If tomorrow, google decided to use its google top-level domain as an email domain, it would be perfectly valid, as could any other company owning top-level domains

Google even owns a gmail TLD so I wouldn't even be surprised if they decided to use it

I don't care who the IRS sends, I am not validating emails with spaces on them.

What if we 👉@👈 ..? 🤭

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.com

This 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.

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.

I gave up when I got like 5 wrong. I've ran mail servers for decades, most of the invalid "valids" would get rejected by any mailservers I've administered.

I had to make an email address just for paypal because those idiots don't accept subdomains in email addresses.

Let us recite the email validator’s oath:

If it has something before the @, something between the @ and the ., and something after the ., it’s valid enough.

I scored 13/21 on https://e-mail.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.

I scored 16/21 on https://e-mail.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.

Damn, and here I thought I had this locked down because I was salty that so many places struggle with + in the email addy. But my god, there's comments?

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.

14 / 21

This is the score you get when you answer "valid" for every question. Good job.

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.

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

nice. though valid but obsolete is not a thing... if it's obsolete it's invalid.

13 right answers and I didn't expect so many lol

I'll never validate some of the 💩 I've learnt today.

I scored 14/21 on https://e-mail.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.

I actually died at the poop emoji one. Actually amazing awareness to test for that

Pretty much everything I've seen in e-mail is needlessly complicated and weird. So of course addresses are as well.

13/21, seems like I am not significantly different from random guessing

I scored 16/21 on https://e-mail.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.

I feel pretty good about that

15

Going to have to try some of those.... Can you actually register emojis as a domain, or is that just the email validation that allows them?

Edit: most TLDs don't. Smaller ones do sometimes.

12/21

are things that are considered out of current spec really "valid" though?