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 Posted by Jerry Stuckle on 10/13/06 16:43 
John Dunlop wrote: 
> Jerry Stuckle: 
>  
>  
>>I did see a regex which would handle all possible addresses.  Don't 
>>remember where I saw it off hand, but it was around 6500 chars long. 
>  
>  
> To give a rough idea to anyone who thinks it's easy, Jerry, point your 
> browser here: 
>  
> http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html 
>  
> That regular expression purportedly validates the well-formedness of 
> RFC822 e-mail addresses excluding comments.  In other words even that 
> monster couldn't validate e-mail addresses itself.  Since RFC2822 
> obsoleted RFC822, the pattern would need to be even larger, because 
> RFC2822 allows obsolete productions from RFC822 as well as its own. 
>  
>  
>>Obviously it's not easy to validate email addresses! 
>  
>  
> Not half. 
>  
> (Slightly pedantic, but validating e-mail addresses and validating 
> e-mail address syntax are two different things.  Validating e-mail 
> addresses entails dicovering if the e-mail address is in use; 
> validating e-mail address syntax entails checking that the syntax 
> matches that allowed by RFC2822.  Go on, witty retort: 'you're not 
> being pedantic; you're being pernickety'.) 
>  
> Enjoy the weekend! 
>  
 
You've got it! :-) 
 
And BTW - you right about the difference.  And you can't validate an  
email address.  Nowadays too many ISP's bit-bucket mail to invalid  
addresses rather than return a message.  Too many spammers were using  
the lack of a response to indicate they hit a valid email address. 
 
--  
================== 
Remove the "x" from my email address 
Jerry Stuckle 
JDS Computer Training Corp. 
jstucklex@attglobal.net 
==================
 
  
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