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Lies We Tell Ourselves About Email Addresses
2026-06-06T22:54:55-04:00
TL;DR: Don't overthink it, just send a verification email.
Bear with me, because some of these “lies” are going to feel obvious, or like unimportant trivia. In all honesty, that’s not that far from the truth. However, I hope you’ll let me try to build a detailed and fun illustration showing how something as mundane as email can break our expectations in surprising ways.
We’ll cover a lot of edge cases, stumble over some small blocks, and even discover a few technically-correct things that are valid, but not commonly supported even in big systems like Gmail (probably for good reason, to be fair).
Each example isn’t necessarily meant to be a meaningful use-case that you need to go make sure you’re handling correctly. But, all together, they’re meant to gradually build toward one main point: Email addresses are mired in old history, and the definitions of valid and invalid components of the system continue to subtly change over time.
It’s easy to make a common-sense decision that is unexpectedly problematic. On top of that, older devs (and older systems) may have expectations that were correct in the past but don’t work anymore. And without further ado, on to the lies…
Let’s get the low-hanging-fruit out of the way. I’m far from the first person to say this online and I certainly won’t be the last. But I feel it’s justified repetition because, even after a thousand blog posts posted, tweets twote, and reddit comments moderated, this antipattern stubbornly persists in 2026.
The regex approach has three main avenues for causing heartache for you, your business, and your customers:
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