So you think you can validate email addresses A journey down RFC5321
FOSDEMCited 4× on HN, 2019–2025
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.
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4 comments from Hacker News
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.
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.
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.
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.