On Monday 17 May 2004 8:45 am, Steve Atkins wrote: > Also, [EMAIL PROTECTED] is a syntactically valid email address, in the > .13 TLD. It does not deliver to 10.11.12.13, or anywhere else, as > of today, unless the MTA or local recursive resolver is broken (a > common case). [EMAIL PROTECTED] is a whole other thing. As is > [EMAIL PROTECTED]::10.11.12.13] and various other IPv6 variants.
Along those lines [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] are valid but they don't necessarily refer to the same mailbox (depends on the mx for foo.bar.com). > Parsing email addresses is a significant part of my day job, and > email address validation is a lot harder than it looks at first > sight. Yes, indeed. > Don't forget quoting, whitespace, escaping and nesting > parenthetical comments.... The "just looking for an @" breaks pretty quickly, say with "joe@"some.dom or a myriad of other variations. > In some contexts the empty string is a valid email address. In some > contexts "Postmaster" is a valid email address. As are postmaster and pOsTmaSTeR and POSTmaster and they are all the same address. > I'm not entirely convinced that an email address is a simple and > well-defined enough datatype to handle comprehensively within the > DB. The validation decisions are complex and vary from application > to application. > > (I use two text columns - localpart and domainpart, with an index > on reverse(lower(domainpart)) and leave validation to the > application, myself). Indeed. A problem with the "email address" datatype is that it hinders normalization: "Joe User" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> is valid but a database designer would probably prefer columns for name and email, or if the addresses were all people, firstname, middlename, lastname, email. As you mentioned, the email can be broken into localpart and domainpart but if the app requires it, the domainpart could be further rendered into toplevel (so you could find all the .gov or .edu), secondlevel (at least corresponds to a registrant) and subdomain(s) as necessary. Cheers, Steve ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
