What is your policy on the use of apostrophe and hyphen in email address?

SpeedySteven
SpeedySteven Member
edited December 2023 in General


Answers

  • Josh Boxer
    Josh Boxer Administrator

    Hi Steven

    Are these characters before or after the @ symbol or both? Are you using a Workflow step or Function or both?

    Hyphens are allowed. My understanding apostrophes are not allowed after the @ symbol. Before the @ symbol are technically valid in more recent specs, but are often blocked by mail servers so Data Studio will flag as invalid. You can test if they return undeliverable here:

    https://www.edq.com/uk/universal-demo/#Email

    Let us know your results

  • SpeedySteven
    SpeedySteven Member

    Thanks Josh - I can see that the apostrophes are being flagged as invalid although our users are challenging these fails. I just wanted to understand your approach to this.

  • Ian Hayden
    Ian Hayden Experian Super Contributor

    Hi Steven,

    Could you elaborate on which type of email validation you are using?

    If you are simply doing a format check, emails with hyphens should validate as true for the name and first part of the domain (i.e. fred-bloggs@my-mail.com) whereas the last part of the domain should not contain them (i.e. fred-bloggs@my-mail.co-m). Apostrophes are allowed in the name but not the domain (i.e. fred-blogg's@my-mail.com is valid, but fred-bloggs@my'mail.com is not).

    We use an industry standard library to verify the format of emails, but the other check types are more involved and IIRC check the existence of the address to varying degrees.

  • Ian Hayden
    Ian Hayden Experian Super Contributor

    Hi Steven,

    To elaborate further, the email validate step behaves as above, but the email validate function is using a more basic regex to validate email addresses that works slightly differently. I will open a ticket to bring this into line with the step.

    Regards,

    Ian

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