I am working with an organization who has an email action alert list
of 2000 names and growing. When sending bulk email, a long list of
addresses is pasted into the bcc: field of a single message. Bad
addresses will stop the message from being sent until the problem
addresses are found and corrected. I am trying to tighten up the
address validation calculation to make it less likely that
incorrectly formatted email addresses are entered.
Currently ebase confirms that the address has one and only one "@",
that it's not the first or last character, and that no other
characters than letters, numbers, ".", "-" or "_" appear.
Looking at the most common data entry errors that have stopped mail
recently, I have added further that it confirm..
- the rightmost characters are one of the common suffix strings
(.com, .org, .gov, .edu, .us, etc.). The _most_ common error is
omitting the suffix ("name@hotmail" for example)
- "." and "@" not appear together
Obviously the last criterion is less than complete, since there are
many, many valid suffix strings. It works ok, though, because ebase
will allow the user to enter a "non-standard" address. Anyone have a
more clever way to validate email addresses? I'd love to include it.
The additional validation I added involves changing the calculation
in the field definition of "Email1 BlankOrValid?" and "Email 2
BlankOrValid?". If it's useful to anyone I'd be happy to send it
along.
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Dave Shaw H4 Consulting
tel: 206-954-7526 fax: 206-625-1338
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