As we all know ARPA is thet university network, funded by the government to
build an information infrastructure that eventually became the internet we
have today. But the standards for text messaging within the ARPA net have
been added to over the years in order to accomodate ever expanding
requirments.
For example I have read that a valid email needn't necessarily require
anything before the @ symbol. The ARPA RFC specifically states that it
does. But <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> can be just as valid as <@foo.bar.com> if the the
domain resolves and the server is setup to parse from a catch all account
named ''. Is this not true?
If this is true then eregi(/^[a-z0-9]+/, $email ) wouldn't necessarily be
valid. We could then say that eregi(/^[a-z0-9]*/, $email) is pointless
becuase if nothing has to be there then there isn't any reason to look for
it. And thus we return to the original assertion that ereg('@', $email) is
the only way to know that the string is a properly formated email address.
So why even validate that format beyond the most basic rules (@, length, and
invalid characters)? The result of which is useless, unless the address is
sendable, in which case the string format is irrelevant.
-Kevin
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miguel Cruz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Kevin Stone" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "PHP-general" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, May 10, 2002 12:30 PM
Subject: Re: [PHP] eregi(mail)
> On Fri, 10 May 2002, Kevin Stone wrote:
> > I had always been suspicious about email validators so I did a big long
> > search on Google about standard address formats. It turns out that
aside
> > from the @ symbol emails have no standard format whatsoever. So
ereg('@',
> > $email) is really the only functional email validator.
>
> There is a format. See:
>
> http://www.merit.edu/internet/documents/rfc/rfc0822.txt
>
> miguel
>
>
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