Validating that an email addresses ain’t what it used to be. I remember writing
simple regular expressions that worked out really well. These days there are a
bajillion TLDs with more being added all of the time. Something I started doing
is checking that the domain of the email being provided has the proper MX
records. Without those DNS records, the domain can’t receive email, period.
Before we can look up the MX record, we will need to break apart the email
address so we can isolate the domain:
$email = 'email@example.com'
list($username, $domain) = explode('@', $email
Now that we have the domain extracted, we can check to see if any MX records
exist:
if (checkdnsrr($domain, 'MX')) {
// Domain has valid MX records
} else {
// Domain is bad, don't accept this email!
}
Keep in mind that this method doesn’t guarantee that the email address is valid,
it just guarantees that the domain itself can accept email. You will still want
to include a few other sanity checks to ensure everything is good to go.
For me, the best way to guarantee that an email address is valid is to send them
an email and make them click a validation link (I use Mandrill). Everything else
is just a bonus so you can alert the user sooner than their address is bad.
