this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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[–] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 18 points 2 days ago (2 children)

13/21, seems like I am not significantly different from random guessing

[–] GreenShimada@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago

Got the same, I can't believe how many weird comments and extra random things can get added into an email address.

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[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 70 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 25 points 3 days ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] camelbeard@lemmy.world 18 points 2 days ago

I scored 16/21 on https://e-mail.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.

I feel pretty good about that

[–] maxwells_daemon@lemmy.world 56 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I don't care who the IRS sends, I am not validating emails with spaces on them.

[–] tyler@programming.dev 21 points 3 days ago (3 children)

You shouldn’t be validating emails yourself anyway. Use a library or check for only the @ and then send an email confirmation.

[–] zurohki@aussie.zone 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] pyre@lemmy.world 23 points 3 days ago (1 children)

nice. though valid but obsolete is not a thing... if it's obsolete it's invalid.

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[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 97 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (7 children)

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

[–] lemmyng@piefed.ca 52 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 37 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Yeah I feel like the correct answer for anything obsoleted by a more recent RFC should be "Invalid".

[–] errer@lemmy.world 45 points 3 days ago

Complaints about the quiz? Send them to 💩@💩

[–] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 25 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

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.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2822#section-4

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[–] codapine@lemmy.zip 23 points 3 days ago (13 children)

Also as the registrant of one of those new fancy TLDs, much like the owner of this website (email.wtf), their own email addresses will fail those stupid email validation checks that only believe in example@example.[com|net|org]

Shitty websites will fail "example@email.wtf", guaranteed - despite it being 100% valid AND potentially live.

Source - I have a ".family" domain for my email server. Totally functional, but some shitty websites refuse to believe it.

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[–] isaaclyman@lemmy.world 31 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Let us recite the email validator’s oath:

If it has something before the @, something between the @ and the ., and something after the ., it’s valid enough.

[–] kopasz7@sh.itjust.works 11 points 3 days ago

The ultimate validation is to see if it gets sent.

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[–] canihasaccount@lemmy.world 47 points 3 days ago (4 children)

What if we 👉@👈 ..? 🤭

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I ~~rage quit~~ gave up at 12.

A fork bomb is apparently a valid email address.

I quit, this is stupid.

[–] CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 61 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

Question 5 is incorrect, name@example is a fully valid email address, even after RFC 2822

The spec of RFC 2822 defines an address (3.4.1) as:

local-part "@" domain

domain is defined (3.4.1) as:

domain = dot-atom / domain-literal / obs-domain

dot-atom is defined (3.2.4) as:

dot-atom = [CFWS] dot-atom-text [CFWS]
dot-atom-text = 1*atext *("." 1*atext)

1*atext meaning at least 1 alphanumeric character, followed by *("." 1*atext) meaning at least 0 "." 1*atext


If tomorrow, google decided to use its google top-level domain as an email domain, it would be perfectly valid, as could any other company owning top-level domains

Google even owns a gmail TLD so I wouldn't even be surprised if they decided to use it

[–] HereIAm@lemmy.world 26 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I don't know if they changes the answer to the question, but it now says name@example is valid.

[–] CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 34 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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

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[–] irish_link@lemmy.world 73 points 3 days ago (1 children)

THIS THING IS STUPID!!!!

Or it’s just me that is the fool. Thanks for sharing. I just learned about 9 new things.

[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 41 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.

[–] TomasEkeli@programming.dev 35 points 3 days ago (9 children)

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.

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[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 28 points 3 days ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] nimble@lemmy.blahaj.zone 49 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] Turious@leaf.dance 16 points 3 days ago (1 children)
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[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 22 points 3 days ago

I lost it at the fork bomb. I mean I hit valid because there was no way it was on the and not valid, but there's no way i'd have expected that. after that I just kept guessing the most stupid answer and did pretty well

[–] geissi@feddit.org 10 points 2 days ago

I vaguely remember a panel where a guy went through various cases like these.

One of the things that stood out is that not every email provides implements the same specs, so one provider might allow you to set up a "valid" email address that might not be able to communicate with other providers as they consider it "invalid".

[–] marzhall@lemmy.world 25 points 3 days ago

I scored 16/21 on https://e-mail.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.

Damn, and here I thought I had this locked down because I was salty that so many places struggle with + in the email addy. But my god, there's comments?

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 39 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

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.com

This 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.

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[–] lefaucet@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 days ago

So much better than I thought it would be! Thank you for making the world a better & more informed place

[–] wellheh@lemmy.sdf.org 14 points 3 days ago

I scored 14/21 on https://e-mail.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.

I actually died at the poop emoji one. Actually amazing awareness to test for that

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 35 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

My top five from this (all valid):

  • ":(){␣:|:&␣};:"@example.com # fork bomb
  • 👉@👈 and poop@[💩]
  • "@"@[@]
  • c̷̨̈́i̵̮̅l̶̠̐͊͝ȁ̷̠̗̆̍̍n̷͖̘̯̍̈͒̅t̶͍͂͋ř̵̞͈̓ȯ̷̯̠-̸͚̖̟͋s̴͉̦̭̔̆̃͒û̵̥̪͆̒̕c̸̨̨̧̺̎k̵̼͗̀s̸̖̜͍̲̈́͋̂͠@example.com
  • fed-up-yet@␣example.com␣ # ␣ = whitespace
[–] toynbee@lemmy.world 21 points 3 days ago

TIL that emoji transcend spoilers.

Emoji showing through spoilers

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[–] hellfire103@lemmy.ca 28 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I scored 13/21 on https://e-mail.wtf/ and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.

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[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 28 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I had to make an email address just for paypal because those idiots don't accept subdomains in email addresses.

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 points 3 days ago

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.

[–] dawcas@scribe.disroot.org 17 points 3 days ago (2 children)

13 right answers and I didn't expect so many lol

I'll never validate some of the 💩 I've learnt today.

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[–] NessD@lemmy.world 25 points 3 days ago (5 children)

14 / 21

This is the score you get when you answer "valid" for every question. Good job.

[–] tostiman@sh.itjust.works 18 points 3 days ago

My score was lower 💀

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[–] dumnezero@piefed.social 24 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Turret3857@infosec.pub 10 points 3 days ago (3 children)

12/21

are things that are considered out of current spec really "valid" though?

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