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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