[devjab]

> The trouble is context. Eg: "malformed email address" is indeed an error that prevents the email process from sending a message

I’m sure you didn’t quite mean it as literal as I’m going to take it and I’m sorry for that. Any process that gets as far as attempting to send an email to something that isn’t a valid e-mail address is, however, an issue that should not be ignored in my opinion.

If your e-mail sending process can’t expect valid input then it should validate its input and not cause an error. Of course this is caused by saving invalid e-mail addresses as e-mail addresses in the first place which in it self shows that you’re in trouble, because that means you have to validate everything everywhere because you can’t trust anything. And so on. I’m obviously not disagreeing with your premise. It’s easy to imagine why it would happen and also why it would in fact end up in the “error.log”, but it’s really not an ignorable issue. Or it can be, and it likely is in a lot of places but that’s exactly GPS point isn’t it? That a culture which allows that will eventually cause the spaceship to crash.

I think we as a society are far too cool with IT errors in general. I recently went to an appointment where they had some digital parking system where you’d enter your license plate. Only the system was down and the receptionist was like “don’t worry, when the system is down they can’t hand out tickets”. Which is all well and good unless you’re damaged by working in digitalisation and can’t help but do the mental math on just how much money that is costing the parking service. It’s not just the system that’s down, it’s also the entire fleet of parking patrol people who have to sit around and wait for it to get to work. It’s the support phones being hammered and so on. And we just collectively shrug it off because that’s just how IT works “teehee”. I realise this example is probably not the best, considering it’s parking services, but it’s like that everywhere isn’t it?

[hansvm]

Attempting to send an email is one of the better ways to see if it's actually valid ;)

Last time I tried to order pizza online for pickup, the website required my email address (I guess cash isn't enough payment and they need an ad destination), but I physically couldn't give them my money because the site had one of those broken email regexes.

[blcknight]

I disagree about extensive validating of email addresses. This is why: https://davidcel.is/articles/stop-validating-email-addresses...

[devjab]

The article you link ends by agreeing with what I said. So I’m not exactly sure what to take it as. If your service fails because it’s trying to create and send an email to an invalid email, then you have an issue. That is not to say that you need excessive validation, but in most email libraries I’ve ever used or build you’re going to get runtime errors if you can’t provide something that looks like x@x.x which is what you want to avoid.

I guess it’s because I’m using the wrong words? English isn’t my first language, but what I mean isn’t that the email actually needs to work just that it needs to have something that is an email format.