Best practices for email address validation (including the + in gmail addresses)

Question

I know there are a lot of questions on here about email validation and specific RegEx\'s. I\'d like to know what the best practices are for validating emails with respect to hav

Answer 1

+ is a valid character in an email address. It doesn't matter if the domain isn't gmail.com or googlemail.com

Regexes aren't actually a very good way of validating emails, but if you just want to modify your regex to handle the plus, change it to the following:

/^([a-zA-Z0-9_.-\+])+@(([a-zA-Z0-9-])+.)+([a-zA-Z0-9]{2,4})+$/

As an example of how this regex doesn't validate against the spec: The email ..@-.com is valid according to it.