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So you think you can validate email addresses A journey down RFC5321

FOSDEMCited 4× on HN, 2019–2025
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talk · intermediate · evergreen · 2019–2025 on HN

Stavros Korokithakis gives a FOSDEM 2018 talk on how hard it is to validate email addresses properly, taking a tour through RFC 5321.

Linked whenever email validation comes up as a fun illustration of how deceptively difficult it is.

4 comments from Hacker News

@stavros2025-08 · in “"Email is Easy" email address quiz”

This is fun, but it feels suspiciously close to my old presentation about the exact same thing: ▶ this video Maybe it's just a coincidence, but a shoutout would have been nice if not.

@stavros2022-04 · in “Stop Validating Email Addresses with Regex (2012)”

I gave a very fun talk on the topic in FOSDEM (VOLUME WARNING!): ▶ this video It's more a joke than edifying, but it was very fun for me (and, I think, the audience), and illustrates the difficulty of email validation well.

@sybercecurity2021-03 · in “I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service”

always relevant: "So you think you can validate email addresses": ▶ this video Which is also why proposals to put email certs (S/MIME, OpenPGP) in the DNS led to hashing the local part, as DNS only allows ASCII and is case insensitive.

@StavrosK2019-06 · in “Firefox Monitor”

The email standard does include the +, yes. Here's a talk on the topic: ▶ this video But yes, that's why Fastmail supports the alternative syntax.