[onemorepassword]

This has been an issue since the day I started programming for the web, back somewhere in '95.

It has regularly come up on HN, and pretty much any programming related forum I've used since the mid-90's.

As an industry at the heart of the information society you have to wonder what the hell we are doing wrong if we cannot stop this constant regression into well known bad practices.

[wodow]

I understand the argument re validating email addresses passively (regex, no regex, etc.) vs actively (send an email by SMTP).

What I don't understand with this ever-repeating discussion is why the complexity has to be visible. e.g.

    > <LARGE REGEX>
    > Yeesh. Is something that complex really necessary?

Many functions are complex - we put those in libraries, pushing them under the hood, and move on.

What is so special about parsing email addresses that makes everyone invent their own solution - regex or otherwise?

[baby]

Plus a Large Regex for mail validation is not supposed to be heavily used. It's supposed to be used once at registration for example. So why would it matter if it's slow/heavy/...

[anonyfuss]

> What is so special about parsing email addresses that makes everyone invent their own solution - regex or otherwise?

A valid email address can contain almost anything; this makes validation via a standard parser mostly useless. As such, devlopers reach for stricter parsers out of a combination of a not comprehending the standards, feeling vague discomfort about letting 'just anything' past data validation, and misplaced concern for users that they believe can't type their own e-mail address.

Add to that the occasional business complaint from the marketing arm about bogus e-mail addresses, and you have people repeatedly solving the problem in slightly different ways, justifying their own divergences from the standard by applying the justification that nobody will use a 'weird' address anyway, and they're actually being helpful.

[eli]

I think it's mostly just bikeshedding. This is a problem that is both largely unimportant but also common enough that many have encountered it (and thus have an opinion).