Checking email addresses

nipper

I am putting a spec together that will require entering the email address. How do people verify the
email address ?

From the CGI/Perl Taint Mode FAQ, it gives me this as a regex:

if ($email =~ /(\w{1}[\w-.]*)\@([\w-.]+)/) {
$email = "$1\@$2";

which implies that valid emails are alpha numeric, dash or period. IIRC, that is not correct, underscore can
be used. Is there an RFC for email addresses ?

What other checking, I was thinking of nslookup $2 as well.

TIA

Andy

Migrateduser

nslookup on $2 can cause performance issues, but if this is an external task and most people aren't concerned about a couple of seconds' delay, then no biggie.

Is it too permissive for $1 to say something like:

/([^\@]+)\@([\w-]+).([\w-.]+)/

?

I've also changed the post-@ components to reflect more realistic email addresses.

Dave