Email is just like physical mail and thankfully just as endearingly human (sometimes).

Once upon a time (1970/80s) I lived on and off in a mystic land called West Germany. Our postal addresses ended with incantations such as BFPO 40.

Around 1985ish my granny send a Christmas card to us. I should note that she was at this time nearly seventy and sadly suffering from Parkinsons. She addressed the card, in rather crabbed but legible handwriting, to:

Graham and Heath BFPO 40

My mum's name is abbreviated - her daughter. At that time Rheindahlen (nr Moenchengladbach) had a pretty large contingent of Brits in it - it was HQ (BAOR).

The card arrived well before Chrimbo and it took about a week judging by the post mark, which was petty normal in those days. She shoved it into a post box in Ipplepen, nr Newton Abbot, Devon and it found its way to an obscure address in another country. I seem to recall she also forgot the stamp but it still got through.

I'm sure mail like that becomes a point of honour to deliver and HM PO and BFPO did the job admirably.

That attitude is how email MTAs are generally designed to work. They cling on to the good old days and sadly the world is a bit shit. Case sensitivity ... lol!

Add the lie "emails are delivered instantly, so the user can click a link I email them within 1 minute"

And the lie "users always read emails on the same device they're logging into a website with"

And the lie "users can always view HTML email so no need to send a plaintext equivalent, especially if I have a long complex URL I want them to click"

And the lie "Clickable links sent in email are more secure than passwords so I'll stop supporting passwords and instead rely on email delivery of a link for all logins. Whoever clicks that link first is definitely the user who wanted to log in"

> It’s likely that more people out there are being filtered by badly-implemented form validation than there are being filtered by their own need of hand-holding.

I wish this was asserted with evidence. The author might suggest this because they have unrealistic views of some users.

> In the year of our lord 2026, you can reasonably expect your users to know how to type their own email address - or even better, auto-input from their OS, browser, keyboard app, or password manager.

This really depends on who your users are.

I have multiple family members who have healthy memory, but can't accurately remember their email address everytime: the localpart, the domain, the syntax, everything.

Sending an email verification isn't sufficient, because if the user has typo'd ".com", they might never receive that email, and the user might never be back, or then have to escalate to support.

Meanwhile, if a site is opinionated on TLDs, they might prevent those users facing issues.

I'm sure there are many sites were users have a large variety of odd email addresses, but also there are sites that cater to mostly non-technical users within 1-2 locales, and so may find the friendliest UX is having opinionated validation.

IIIRC in terms of clients mutt (&co) will actually handle “@“ in the local part correctly.

> But the real reason I do that is just because I just like to sit in anger whenever this breaks the user experience because of programming errors or inconsistencies.

Genuinely delighted by the fact that I’m not alone in that.

The plus sign is a pet peeve of mine, too. But I stopped keeping a list of bad sites when their number has become double digit!

I enjoyed the deep dice. A lot of sensible advice, and enjoyed the deep dive. A lot of articles do not get a lot of that as right as this article does.

Anyone who also enjoyed it would probably get a kick out of my article on the same subject that goes into the regex (which has some valid use cases): https://hackernoon.com/on-the-practicality-of-regex-for-emai...

This article says that Gmail can't handle address literals. I personally wrote the IPv6 address literal support for Gmail, so this annoys me. I just tested it and it shortened "[IPv6:2001:etc:etc::192.etc.etc]" down to "@2001" then generated an extremely terse mail delivery subsystem notification that I've never seen before. Which is why you should never just rewrite software without understanding why all the test cases are in the test suite!