mailcheck VS Mail

Not an "instead of" approach, but the best thing I'd implemented when running an ecom site was a typo detector that prompted people to fix their email if it looked wrong, like "[email protected]", "Did you mean [email protected]?".

At the time I used "mailcheck": https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck

There appears to be a more modern implementation here: https://github.com/ZooTools/email-spell-checker

It reduced the amount of badly entered emails more than any other approach I tried.

It misses the very common mistake of typing a comma instead of a dot.

Otherwise, yeah, most people would be better served by a library that detects domain typos like https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck than spending time on regexes.

The most helpful thing I've used in the real world is something that looks for common typographical errors, even if the email is technically valid.

Like, if the user types "[email protected]", it pops a dialogue asking "Did you mean "[email protected]". But lets them keep what they typed, or do a different fix if needed.

I found some JS called "mailcheck": https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck

There are updated clones that use react, vue, etc, instead of jquery.

With a working ecommerce site, this improved the percentage of correct emails more than anything else I tried, and I had tried many things. Because it's a bad situation when you've taken someone's money and have nothing other than a shipping address to contact them if something goes wrong (bad shipping address, out of stock situation, etc).

I somewhat lol'd when the demo allowed "[email protected]" just fine. Guess kickstarter isn't using mailcheck anymore. Looks like it's an open issue:

https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck/issues/179

I suppose it depends on what we mean by validate. Running an ecommerce site, I got a lot of mileage out of prompting the customer to fix emails that "looked wrong". We allowed them to proceed if they wanted. A really common one was "[email protected]" when "[email protected]" was wanted. We used a slightly modified version of https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck and found it to be really useful.

It does work well. I used a customized version of https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck on an ecomm website and the amount of bounces due to typos went way down.

"2.8.0.1. Fixes file permissions in 2.8.0 release. No code changes."

https://github.com/mikel/mail/tags

I would look to existing libraries to see how they solve the problem. Stack Overflow is OK, but I find that the "one liner" solutions you find there often oversimplify. There is a popular, and currently maintained, Rubygem library called Mail that includes a class for quoted printable, which in turn provides a class method for decoding quoted printable strings.

This is easiest if you have a MacBook since Ruby is installed by default. You can make a small script using this Ruby gem (plugin) - https://github.com/mikel/mail

There are basically three levels of address checking:

1) You need to validate an email field for login or a website - checking for an @ mark with some text before and at least one . after the @ will do for this.

2) You need to do some sort of address validation, library regexps like this will do for 99.9...% of these.

3) You are building an email handling system which needs to actually support the RFCs, in which case regexp will not handle what you need, and you need to use a proper parser, like https://github.com/mikel/mail/tree/master/lib/mail/parsers

Ref: I am the original author of the Ruby mail gem.

Email addresses have a lot of gotchas that can make rolling your own logic hard. I haven't used Ruby in a while but there are gems like Mail that can help validating email addresses easier.