Validating E-mails (97 and >)

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Loungers

Sorry to bother you, but is there a better way to check if an e-mail entered by the user is in the right format?

That is I can check to see if there is a @ sign, or maybe it the e-mail has .com at the end of it, but then there are a lot of domains and if you are say in another country then the .com might not be the last thing in the string.

I was trying to see if I get an error if I use the hyperlink, and do a mailto, but that is also not so accurate.

I have the user enter e-mails in a textbox on the userform, and I need to vaidate that entry before moving on. Mind you I don’t want to validate if the e-mail is working, just its format.

Thanks for any suggestions?

Wassim

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Wassim

I do not believe that there is a validation method that works short of sending a mail and confirming that a response comes back from a real person.

The only syntax check possible is that it is a text string with no spaces, the @ sign and at least one full stop somewhere after the @ sign.
Even then you will be defeated by users who really want to hide their real email address by entering a validly formatted one.
e.g. nowhere@nowhere.com is likely to be invalid

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Hello Wassim,

There is an additional check you could make if you want to make the effort.
You could verify the entry after the last dot by using a lookup table or array containing all the country codes plus the conventional endings… com, net, gov, edu etc.
I complied a list of 256 country codes to satisfy my curiosity about where people were posting from.
You can do the same by melding lists from…

http://www-old.ics.uci.edu/pub/websoft/www…untry-codes.txt
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/i…t-en1-semic.txt

There are other very similar lists available by doing a google search for “country codes”.

Hope this helps.

Jim Cone
San Francisco, CA

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