What is the best Java email address validation method? [closed]

Answer 1

Although there are many alternatives to Apache commons, their implementations are rudimentary at best (like Apache commons' implementation itself) and even dead wrong in other cases.

I'd also stay away from so called simple 'non-restrictive' regex; there's no such thing. For example @ is allowed multiple times depending on context, how do you know the required one is there? Simple regex won't understand it, even though the email should be valid. Anything more complex becomes error-prone or even contain hidden performance killers. How are you going to maintain something like this?

The only comprehensive RFC compliant regex based validator I'm aware of is email-rfc2822-validator with its 'refined' regex appropriately named Dragons.java. It supports only the older RFC-2822 spec though, although appropriate enough for modern needs (RFC-5322 updates it in areas already out of scope for daily use cases).

But really what you want is a lexer that properly parses a string and breaks it up into the component structure according to the RFC grammar. EmailValidator4J seems promising in that regard, but is still young and limited.

Another option you have is using a webservice such as Mailgun's battle-tested validation webservice or Mailboxlayer API (just took the first Google results). It is not strictly RFC compliant, but works well enough for modern needs.

Answer 2

Heres my pragmatic approach, where I just want reasonable distinct blah@domain addresses using the allowable characters from the RFC. Addresses must be converted to lowercase beforehand.

public class EmailAddressValidator {

    private static final String domainChars = "a-z0-9\\-";
    private static final String atomChars = "a-z0-9\\Q!#$%&'*+-/=?^_`{|}~\\E";
    private static final String emailRegex = "^" + dot(atomChars) + "@" + dot(domainChars) + "$";
    private static final Pattern emailPattern = Pattern.compile(emailRegex);

    private static String dot(String chars) {
        return "[" + chars + "]+(?:\\.[" + chars + "]+)*";
    }

    public static boolean isValidEmailAddress(String address) {
        return address != null && emailPattern.matcher(address).matches();
    }

}

Answer 3

Late to the question, here, but: I maintain a class at this address: http://lacinato.com/cm/software/emailrelated/emailaddress

It is based on Les Hazlewood's class, but has numerous improvements and fixes a few bugs. Apache license.

I believe it is the most capable email parser in Java, and I have yet to see one more capable in any language, though there may be one out there. It's not a lexer-style parser, but uses some complicated java regex, and thus is not as efficient as it could be, but my company has parsed well over 10 billion real-world addresses with it: it's certainly usable in a high-performance situation. Maybe once a year it'll hit an address that causes a regex stack overflow (appropriately), but these are spam addresses which are hundreds or thousands of characters long with many many quotes and parenthesis and the like.

RFC 2822 and the related specs are really quite permissive in terms of email addresses, so a class like this is overkill for most uses. For example, the following is a legitimate address, according to spec, spaces and all:

"<bob \" (here) " < (hi there) "bob(the man)smith" (hi) @ (there) example.com (hello) > (again)

No mail server would allow that, but this class can parse it (and rewrite it to a usable form).

We found the existing Java email parser options to be insufficiently durable (meaning, all of them could not parse some valid addresses), so we created this class.

The code is well-documented and has a lot of easy-to-change options to allow or disallow certain email forms. It also provides a lot of methods to access certain parts of the address (left-hand side, right-hand side, personal names, comments, etc), to parse/validate mailbox-list headers, to parse/validate the return-path (which is unique among the headers), and so forth.

The code as written has a javamail dependency, but it's easy to remove if you don't want the minor functionality it provides.

Answer 4

If you are trying to do a form validation received from the client, or just a bean validation - keep it simple. It's better to do a loose email validation rather than to do a strict one and reject some people, (e.g. when they are trying to register for your web service). With almost anything allowed in the username part of the email and so many new domains being added literally every month (e.g. .company, .entreprise, .estate), it's safer not to be restrictive:

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("^.+@.+\\..+$");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(email);

Answer 5

If you're looking to verify whether an email address is valid, then VRFY will get you some of the way. I've found it's useful for validating intranet addresses (that is, email addresses for internal sites). However it's less useful for internet mail servers (see the caveats at the top of this page)

Answer 6

Another option is use the Hibernate email validator, using the annotation @Email or using the validator class programatically, like:

import org.hibernate.validator.internal.constraintvalidators.hv.EmailValidator; 

class Validator {
    // code
    private boolean isValidEmail(String email) {
        EmailValidator emailValidator = new EmailValidator();
        return emailValidator.isValid(email, null);
    }

}