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
13/21 here. Mostly got hung up on several “this was valid in earlier RFC, and later removed” kind of situations. There are several where I picked the correct answer, but where I know many websites that won’t accept it as valid, and that’s not even the more esoteric ones.
Yeah I feel like the correct answer for anything obsoleted by a more recent RFC should be “Invalid”.
Complaints about the quiz? Send them to 💩@💩
But they will work, and according to the spec, you have to build your system so that it can handle those cases. Obsolete doesn’t mean incorrect or invalid, just a “you shouldn’t do this any more”.
Obsolete Syntax
Earlier versions of this standard allowed for different (usually more liberal) syntax than is allowed in this version. Also, there have been syntactic elements used in messages on the Internet whose interpretation have never been documented. Though some of these syntactic forms MUST NOT be generated according to the grammar in section 3, they MUST be accepted and parsed by a conformant receiver.Some of those “obsolete” things are outright blocked for specific reasons. For example, routing addresses through multiple servers. It was abused by spammers, so it’s almost always denied these days.
Looks like this:
<@foo.example.com@bar.example.com:123@example.com>Well shit, yeah, that “MUST be accepted and parsed” is pretty explicit. That sucks. What is even the point of revising standards? How the fuck do we ever get rid of some of these bad ideas?
I got 14/21
Samsies
Don’t tell me what to do!
THIS THING IS STUPID!!!
Or it’s just me that is the fool. Thanks for sharing. I just learned about 9 new things.
All of the modern internet is built on the decaying carcasses of temporary solutions and things that seemed like a good idea at the moment but are now too widely used to change.
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.
The main one that gets passed around will match the weirdness fine. In fact, it probably matches things you don’t want, anyway.
A signin/registration form really only needs to do sanity checks to get rid of obviously bad addresses. You’ll have to send a round-trip email confirmation message to make sure the email is real, anyway, so why bother going into great detail? Just check that there’s an ‘@’ symbol and a dot in the domain. Most of the rest is wanking off.
A domaine without tld (me@home) is a valide address. I saw an email server being used as a mqtt-like server this way (it is very old and predate those software).
An address without a domain is irrelevant for a signin/registration form. Which is like 90% of the code being written in the wild to validate addresses.
If you’re writing an email server, then you need to care about all these details. Most of us never will.
Question 5 is incorrect,
name@exampleis a fully valid email address, even after RFC 2822The spec of RFC 2822 defines an address (3.4.1) as:
local-part "@" domaindomainis defined (3.4.1) as:domain = dot-atom / domain-literal / obs-domaindot-atomis defined (3.2.4) as:dot-atom = [CFWS] dot-atom-text [CFWS] dot-atom-text = 1*atext *("." 1*atext)1meaning at least 1 alphanumeric character, followed by*("." 1*atext)meaning at least 0"." 1*atext
If tomorrow, google decided to use its
googletop-level domain as an email domain, it would be perfectly valid, as could any other company owning top-level domainsGoogle even owns a
gmailTLD so I wouldn’t even be surprised if they decided to use itI don’t know if they changes the answer to the question, but it now says
name@exampleis valid.It does say it’s valid, but also that it’s obsolete, and while the RFC does define valid but obsolete specs, there is nothing defining domains without a dot as obsolete, and it is in fact defined in the regular spec, not the obsolete section
I see what you mean, I’m with you now.
It says valid but obsolete, which sounds like a contradiction to me.
This is technically valid but considered obsolete. RFC 822 allowed domains without dots, but RFC 2822 made this obsolete.
Do email suffix not indicate a different domain like .org and .com for websites?
I don’t care who the IRS sends, I am not validating emails with spaces on them.
You shouldn’t be validating emails yourself anyway. Use a library or check for only the
and then send an email confirmation.Even if it’s a completely valid address and the domain exists, they still might’ve fat fingered the username part. Going to extreme lengths to validate email addresses is pointless, you still have to send an email to it anyway.
I seem to have annoyed an admin of an instance enough for them to subscribe my signup email to hundreds of dating profiles (presumably using a service that offers to harass someone for you)
Many of them aren’t good at validating email
One in ten has one email arrive, asking me to click a link to confirm
9 in ten have 5 emails before I notice them:
- Please click a link to confirm
- You received a wink
- You received a wink
- You received 3 chat requests
- You received a link
So it’s important to not send emails beyond the validate one to unvalidated addresses, to perfect your service annoying or harassing this parties
Also, use a disposable address for signing up to Lemmy
This is the way.
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Bottom-ass email address.
No ring for that.
What if we 👉@👈 …? 🤭
Now i just need a registrar that allows emoji…
Any should. Any unicode is converted to alphabetical anyways, through “xn–” + a punycode conversion. Which is actually fairly important for places that don’t use the Latin alphabet.
See http://xn-bdk.gay/, which is the same as http://ツ.gay/
(Someone set this up on 196 a while ago, they said they were using Namecheap)
oh jesus, rabbit hole accepted, thanks!
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.comThis 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.
The routing feature is so cursed XD
My top five from this (all valid):
- ":()␣:;:"@example.com # fork bomb
- 👉@👈 and poop@[💩]
- “@”@[@]
- c̷̨̈́i̵̮̅l̶̠̐͊͝ȁ̷̠̗̆̍̍n̷͖̘̯̍̈͒̅t̶͍͂͋ř̵̞͈̓ȯ̷̯̠-̸͚̖̟͋s̴͉̦̭̔̆̃͒û̵̥̪͆̒̕c̸̨̨̧̺̎k̵̼͗̀s̸̖̜͍̲̈́͋̂͠@example.com
- fed-up-yet@␣example.com␣ # ␣ = whitespace
TIL that emoji transcend spoilers.
Spoilers!
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Let us recite the email validator’s oath:
If it has something before the
, something between theand the., and something after the., it’s valid enough.The ultimate validation is to see if it gets sent.
Fails for when there is no TLD. Just send an email and validate a response eg from a link.
No. The number of users who have a real email with no TLD is far less than the number of users who will accidentally type an email with no TLD if you don’t validate on the front end.
I’m here to help 99.9% of users sign up correctly, not to be completely spec-compliant for the 0.1% who think they’re special.
Guess my mail@IPv6 won’t be accepted because I was too poor to pay for a domain name after having paid for a static IPv6.
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.
Hooray, you have better security than Apple, who won’t let me use my own email because some idiot in Australia used it first.
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.
And for a good reason.
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.
And they are …
I had to make an email address just for paypal because those idiots don’t accept subdomains in email addresses.
Pizza Hut doesn’t allow dashes in the domain. This prevents me from ordering Pizza Hut with the email under my personal domain. This can be considered a feature.
nice. though valid but obsolete is not a thing… if it’s obsolete it’s invalid.
Agreed! (because then I would get 3 more points on the test)
