On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 05:21, Simon Connah via Python-list
<python-list@python.org> wrote:
Could someone push me in the right direction please? I just want to
find out if a string is a valid email address.
There is only one way to know that a string is a valid email address,
and that's to send an email to it.
What is your goal though? For example, if you're trying to autolink
email addresses in text, you don't really care whether it's valid,
only that it looks like an address.
Could someone push me in the right direction please? I just want to find out if a string is a valid email address.
Hi,
I'm building a simple project using smtplib and have a question. I've been doing unit testing but I'm not sure how to check if an email message is valid. Using regex sounds like a bad idea to me and the other options I found required paying for thirdparty services.
Could someone push me in the right direction please? I just want to find out if a string is a valid email address.
Thank you.
Simon.-----------------------3c536f3c3043a57bd0cf1aeb5dcf92eb--
On 2023-11-01, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 05:21, Simon Connah via Python-list
<python-list@python.org> wrote:
Could someone push me in the right direction please? I just want to
find out if a string is a valid email address.
There is only one way to know that a string is a valid email address,
and that's to send an email to it.
What is your goal though? For example, if you're trying to autolink
email addresses in text, you don't really care whether it's valid,
only that it looks like an address.
There's often value in even only partially-effective checks though.
With an email address you can easily check to see if it has an "@",
and if the stuff after the "@" is a syntactically valid domain name.
You can also go a bit further and check to see if the domain has an
MX record, and if it doesn't then it is extremely unlikely that the
address is valid.
OK. I've been doing some reading and that you should avoid regex to check email addresses. So what I was thinking was something like this:
On 11/1/23 05:35, Simon Connah via Python-list wrote:
OK. I've been doing some reading and that you should avoid regex to check email addresses. So what I was thinking was something like this:
To be a little more specific, Avoid Rolling Your Own RegEx. It's very tricky, and you will get it subtly wrong.
OK. I've been doing some reading and that you should avoid regex to check email addresses.
if type(email_recipient) != email.message.Message:
I just don't know why that particular line isn't working.
I'm building a simple project using smtplib and have a
question. I've been doing unit testing but I'm not sure how to check
if an email message is valid.
Using regex sounds like a bad idea to me and the other options I
found required paying for third party services.
Could someone push me in the right direction please? I just want to
find out if a string is a valid email address.
Make sure it has an '@' in it. Possibly require at least one '.'
after the '@'.
On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 08:09, Grant Edwards via Python-list
<python-list@python.org> wrote:
Make sure it has an '@' in it. Possibly require at least one '.'
after the '@'.
No guarantee that there'll be a dot after the at.
(Technically there's no guarantee of an at sign either, but email
addresses without at signs are local-only, so in many contexts, you
can assume there needs to be an at.)
So the regex to match all valid email addresses that aren't
local-only is... drumroll please...
r"@"
On 2023-11-01, Chris Angelico via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:
On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 08:09, Grant Edwards via Python-list
<python-list@python.org> wrote:
Make sure it has an '@' in it. Possibly require at least one '.'
after the '@'.
No guarantee that there'll be a dot after the at.
Ah, I forgot about defaulting to a local domain if one is
omitted. Will MTAs do that these days?
(Technically there's no guarantee of an at sign either, but email
addresses without at signs are local-only, so in many contexts, you
can assume there needs to be an at.)
So the regex to match all valid email addresses that aren't
local-only is... drumroll please...
r"@"
Unless you want to support UUCP or X400 addresses...
:)
Hi,party services.
I'm building a simple project using smtplib and have a question. I've been doing unit testing but I'm not sure how to check if an email message is valid. Using regex sounds like a bad idea to me and the other options I found required paying for third
Could someone push me in the right direction please? I just want to find out if a string is a valid email address.
On 2023-11-01, Simon Connah via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:[...]
I'm building a simple project using smtplib and have a
question. I've been doing unit testing but I'm not sure how to check
if an email message is valid.
Could someone push me in the right direction please? I just want to
find out if a string is a valid email address.
On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 08:09, Grant Edwards via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:
Make sure it has an '@' in it. Possibly require at least one '.'
after the '@'.
No guarantee that there'll be a dot after the at. (Technically there's
no guarantee of an at sign either, but email addresses without at
signs are local-only, so in many contexts, you can assume there needs
to be an at.)
Hi,party services.
I'm building a simple project using smtplib and have a question. I've been doing unit testing but I'm not sure how to check if an email message is valid. Using regex sounds like a bad idea to me and the other options I found required paying for third
Could someone push me in the right direction please? I just want to find out if a string is a valid email address.
Thank you.
Simon.
On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 08:09, Grant Edwards via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:
Make sure it has an '@' in it. Possibly require at least one '.'
after the '@'.
No guarantee that there'll be a dot after the at. (Technically there's
no guarantee of an at sign either, but email addresses without at
signs are local-only, so in many contexts, you can assume there needs
to be an at.)
Yes, it would be nice if there was a syntax for sending a test message sort of like an ACK that is not delivered to the recipient but merely results in some status being sent back such as DELIVERABLE or NO SUCH USER or even MAILBOX FULL.
On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 15:20, AVI GROSS via Python-list ><python-list@python.org> wrote:
Yes, it would be nice if there was a syntax for sending a test
message sort
of like an ACK that is not delivered to the recipient but merely results in >> some status being sent back such as DELIVERABLE or NO SUCH USER or even
MAILBOX FULL.
Yes, it would! Spammers would be able to use this syntax to figure out >exactly which addresses actually have real people connected to it. It
would save them so much trouble! Brilliant idea.
On 2023-11-01, Simon Connah via Python-list python-list@python.org wrote:
I'm building a simple project using smtplib and have a
question. I've been doing unit testing but I'm not sure how to check
if an email message is valid.
Send an e-mail using it? If the right person gets the e-mail, then
it's valid?
Using regex sounds like a bad idea to me and the other options I
found required paying for third party services.
Could someone push me in the right direction please? I just want to
find out if a string is a valid email address.
You'll have to define "valid". Valid syntactically according to
<what>? Will be accepted by an SMTP server somewhere? Corresponds to
a real person?
Make sure it has an '@' in it. Possibly require at least one '.'
after the '@'.
Trying to do anything more than that is just wasting your time and
annoying the mule.
On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 05:21, Simon Connah via Python-list python-list@python.org wrote:
Could someone push me in the right direction please? I just want to find out if a string is a valid email address.
There is only one way to know that a string is a valid email address,
and that's to send an email to it.
What is your goal though? For example, if you're trying to autolink
email addresses in text, you don't really care whether it's valid,
only that it looks like an address.
My goal is to make a simple mailing list platform. I guess I could just send email to an address and if it bounces then I can remove it from the database. Thing is I'm not sure how close to a real email address an email has to be in order to be bounced.If it was completely wrong it might just swallowed up.
On 2023-11-01, Chris Angelico rosuav@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 05:21, Simon Connah via Python-list python-list@python.org wrote:
Could someone push me in the right direction please? I just want to
find out if a string is a valid email address.
There is only one way to know that a string is a valid email address,
and that's to send an email to it.
What is your goal though? For example, if you're trying to autolink
email addresses in text, you don't really care whether it's valid,
only that it looks like an address.
There's often value in even only partially-effective checks though.
With an email address you can easily check to see if it has an "@",
and if the stuff after the "@" is a syntactically valid domain name.
You can also go a bit further and check to see if the domain has an
MX record, and if it doesn't then it is extremely unlikely that the
address is valid.
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
On 02Nov2023 17:04, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 15:20, AVI GROSS via Python-list ><python-list@python.org> wrote:
Yes, it would be nice if there was a syntax for sending a test
message sort
of like an ACK that is not delivered to the recipient but merely results in
some status being sent back such as DELIVERABLE or NO SUCH USER or even
MAILBOX FULL.
Yes, it would! Spammers would be able to use this syntax to figure out >exactly which addresses actually have real people connected to it. It
would save them so much trouble! Brilliant idea.
Hmm. IIRC...
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2821#section-4.1.1.6
I think a lot of mail receivers don't honour this one, for exactly the reasons above.
On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 05:21, Simon Connah via Python-list
python-list@python.org wrote:
Could someone push me in the right direction please? I just want to find out if a string is a valid email address.
There is only one way to know that a string is a valid email address,
and that's to send an email to it.
What is your goal though? For example, if you're trying to autolink
email addresses in text, you don't really care whether it's valid,
only that it looks like an address.
My goal is to make a simple mailing list platform. I guess I could just send email to an address and if it bounces then I can remove it from the database. Thing is I'm not sure how close to a real email address an email has to be in order to be bounced.If it was completely wrong it might just swallowed up.
See https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9585?page=0,0
My goal is to make a simple mailing list platform. I guess I could just send >email to an address and if it bounces then I can remove it from the database.
On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 17:47, Simon Connah <simon.n.connah@protonmail.com> wrote:bounced. If it was completely wrong it might just swallowed up.
My goal is to make a simple mailing list platform. I guess I could just send email to an address and if it bounces then I can remove it from the database. Thing is I'm not sure how close to a real email address an email has to be in order to be
Every address is completely separate. There is no "closeness". Just
send email to an address.
I'm not sure that would be practical. As I'm setting up a mailing list server I don't know if someone in the future is going to need to use one of those aliases and testing manually would be tedious.
Agreed.
However, with names that are frequently misspelled or which are commonly-spelled slightly differently, the 'trick' is to anticipate
problems and set up aliases which forward messages to the correct address*.
eg Kelvin -> Kevlin
Niel, Neal, Neale (etc) -> Neil
(in the same way that GoodLookingGuy@mydomain -> me,
or (more likely) MailAdmin -> me)
* however, this can end-up perpetuating the mistake, rather than correcting...
--
Regards,
=dn
On 02/11/2023 19.46, Simon Connah via Python-list wrote:
[...]
My goal is to make a simple mailing list platform. I guess I could
just send email to an address and if it bounces then I can remove it
from the database. Thing is I'm not sure how close to a real email
address an email has to be in order to be bounced. If it was
completely wrong it might just swallowed up.
Exactly!
Build a complementary script which inspects the returned/bounced
messages, and removes those addresses.
Given that the list of addresses is built from people signing-up in the
first place, one has to presume that people know their own addresses and
can type - there's no real defence against 'stupid'*. It's not as if you
are making-up addresses yourself (in many jurisdictions it is illegal
without opt-in).
On 2023-11-01 17:17, Chris Angelico via Python-list wrote:
On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 08:09, Grant Edwards via Python-list
<python-list@python.org> wrote:
Make sure it has an '@' in it. Possibly require at least one '.'
after the '@'.
No guarantee that there'll be a dot after the at. (Technically there's
no guarantee of an at sign either, but email addresses without at
signs are local-only, so in many contexts, you can assume there needs
to be an at.)
druid!darcy - doesn't work any more but not because it is syntactically incorrect.
Remember the good old days when we were able to test if an address
existed without sending? That was before the black hats discovered the Internet.
Valid as in conforms to the standard. Although having looked at the
standard that might be more difficult than originally planned.
On Thu, 2 Nov 2023 at 15:20, AVI GROSS via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:
Yes, it would be nice if there was a syntax for sending a test message sort >> of like an ACK that is not delivered to the recipient but merely results in >> some status being sent back such as DELIVERABLE or NO SUCH USER or even
MAILBOX FULL.
Yes, it would! Spammers would be able to use this syntax to figure out exactly which addresses actually have real people connected to it. It
would save them so much trouble! Brilliant idea.
Please re-read.
Discussion is about "closeness".
Thus, what you might expect from email servers and Admins, NOT what you should do. That part should be quite evident by now!
Yes, it would be nice if there was a syntax for sending a test messagesort
of like an ACK that is not delivered to the recipient but merely resultsin
some status being sent back such as DELIVERABLE or NO SUCH USER or even MAILBOX FULL.
Yes, it would be nice if there was a syntax for sending a test message sort of like an ACK that is not delivered to the recipient but merely results in some status being sent back such as DELIVERABLE or NO SUCH USER or even MAILBOX FULL.
I note earlier iterations of email had addressed like mach1!mach2!mach3!ihnp4!mach5!mach6!user or even mach1!mach2!user@mach3 and
I remember tools that analyzed what other machines various machines claimed to have a direct connection to and tried to figure out a connection from
your source to destination, perhaps a shorter one or maybe a less expensive one. Hence machines like ihnp4 and various universities that were densely connected to others got lots of traffic. In that scenario, validity had another meaning.
Basically I'm writing unit tests and one of them passess in a string
with an invalid email address. I need to be able to check the string
to see if it is a valid email so that the unit test passess.
Valid as in conforms to the standard. Although having looked at the
standard that might be more difficult than originally planned.
On 2023-11-02, Simon Connah <simon.n.connah@protonmail.com> wrote:
Valid as in conforms to the standard. Although having looked at the standard that might be more difficult than originally planned.
Yes. Almost nobody actually implements "the standard" as in RFC 2822
section 3.4.1 (which can contain, for example, non-printable control characters, and comments), nor is it particularly clear that they
should. So while checking against "the spec" might sound right, it's
highly unlikely that it's what you actually want. Would you really
want to allow:
(jam today) "chris @ \"home\""@ (Chris's host.)public.example
for example? And would you be able to do anything with it if you did?
My guess is that a first test of an email address might be to see if a decent module of that kind fills out the object to your satisfaction. You can then perhaps test parts of the object, rather than everything at once, to see if it is obviouslyinvalid. As an example, what does user@alpha.......com with what seems to be lots of meaningless periods, get parsed into?
On Fri, 3 Nov 2023 at 12:21, AVI GROSS via Python-list
<python-list@python.org> wrote:
My guess is that a first test of an email address might be to see if
a decent module of that kind fills out the object to your
satisfaction. You can then perhaps test parts of the object, rather
than everything at once, to see if it is obviously invalid. As an
example, what does user@alpha.......com with what seems to be lots of
meaningless periods, get parsed into?
What do you mean by "obviously invalid"? Have you read the RFC?
My guess is that a first test of an email address might be to see if adecent module of that kind fills out the object to your satisfaction. You
On 11/2/23 00:42, Simon Connah via Python-list wrote:
Valid as in conforms to the standard. Although having looked at the
standard that might be more difficult than originally planned.
You'll have to read the relevant RFCs. Lots of corner cases! From what
I can see virtually no one on the internet gets it right, judging by the number of times I have valid email addresses flagged as not valid by
poor algorithms.
On 11/2/23 00:42, Simon Connah via Python-list wrote:
Basically I'm writing unit tests and one of them passess in a string
with an invalid email address. I need to be able to check the string
to see if it is a valid email so that the unit test passess.
If you truly have managed to code an RFC-compliant verifier, I commend you.
On 2023-11-03, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, 3 Nov 2023 at 12:21, AVI GROSS via Python-list
<python-list@python.org> wrote:
My guess is that a first test of an email address might be to see if
a decent module of that kind fills out the object to your
satisfaction. You can then perhaps test parts of the object, rather
than everything at once, to see if it is obviously invalid. As an
example, what does user@alpha.......com with what seems to be lots of
meaningless periods, get parsed into?
What do you mean by "obviously invalid"? Have you read the RFC?
What do you mean by 'What do you mean by "obviously invalid"?'
Have you read the RFC?
On 11/3/2023 6:51 AM, Jon Ribbens via Python-list wrote:
On 2023-11-03, Chris Angelico rosuav@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, 3 Nov 2023 at 12:21, AVI GROSS via Python-list python-list@python.org wrote:
My guess is that a first test of an email address might be to see if
a decent module of that kind fills out the object to your
satisfaction. You can then perhaps test parts of the object, rather than everything at once, to see if it is obviously invalid. As an example, what does user@alpha.......com with what seems to be lots of meaningless periods, get parsed into?
What do you mean by "obviously invalid"? Have you read the RFC?
What do you mean by 'What do you mean by "obviously invalid"?'
Have you read the RFC?
About reading the RFC, there's this ... but read the comments too ...
https://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validate-an-email-address-until-i.aspx/
On 2023-11-02, Simon Connah simon.n.connah@protonmail.com wrote:
Valid as in conforms to the standard. Although having looked at the standard that might be more difficult than originally planned.
Yes. Almost nobody actually implements "the standard" as in RFC 2822
section 3.4.1 (which can contain, for example, non-printable control characters, and comments), nor is it particularly clear that they
should. So while checking against "the spec" might sound right, it's
highly unlikely that it's what you actually want. Would you really
want to allow:
(jam today) "chris @ \"home\""@ (Chris's host.)public.example
for example? And would you be able to do anything with it if you did?
Wow. I'm half tempted to make a weird email address to see how many websites get it wrong.
Thank you for the link.
On 11/4/23 02:51, Simon Connah via Python-list wrote:
Wow. I'm half tempted to make a weird email address to see how many
websites get it wrong.
Thank you for the link.
Nearly all websites seem to reject simple correct email addresses
such as myemail+sometext@example.domain. I like to use this kind of
email address when I can to help me filter out the inevitable spam
that comes from companies selling off my address even after claiming
they won't.
So I suspect that nearly all websites are going to reject other
kinds of weird email addresses you can create that are actually
correct.
Definitely. Syntactic e-mail address "validation" is one of the most
useless and widely broken things on the Interwebs. People who do
anything other than require an '@' (and optionally make you enter the
same @-containing string twice) are deluding themselves.
On 11/4/23 02:51, Simon Connah via Python-list wrote:
Wow. I'm half tempted to make a weird email address to see how many
websites get it wrong.
Thank you for the link.
Nearly all websites seem to reject simple correct email addresses
such as myemail+sometext@example.domain. I like to use this kind of
email address when I can to help me filter out the inevitable spam
that comes from companies selling off my address even after claiming
they won't.
So I suspect that nearly all websites are going to reject other
kinds of weird email addresses you can create that are actually
correct.
On 2023-11-05 00:39, Grant Edwards via Python-list wrote:
Definitely. Syntactic e-mail address "validation" is one of the most
useless and widely broken things on the Interwebs. People who do
anything other than require an '@' (and optionally make you enter the
same @-containing string twice) are deluding themselves.
And don't get me started on phone number validation. The most annoying
thing to me, though, is sites that reject names that have an apostrophe
in them. I hate being told that my name, that I have been using for
over seventy years, is invalid.
OK, now that I am started, what else? Oh yah. Look at your credit
card. The number has spaces in it. Why do I have to remove them. If
you don't like them then you are a computer, just remove them.
On 2023-11-05 00:39, Grant Edwards via Python-list wrote:
Definitely. Syntactic e-mail address "validation" is one of the most
useless and widely broken things on the Interwebs. People who do
anything other than require an '@' (and optionally make you enter the
same @-containing string twice) are deluding themselves.
And don't get me started on phone number validation. The most annoying thing to me, though, is sites that reject names that have an apostrophe
in them. I hate being told that my name, that I have been using for
over seventy years, is invalid.
OK, now that I am started, what else? Oh yah. Look at your credit
card. The number has spaces in it. Why do I have to remove them. If
you don't like them then you are a computer, just remove them.
When do we stop working for computers and have the computers start
working for us?
On 2023-11-05, D'Arcy Cain via Python-list <python-list@python.org> wrote:
On 2023-11-05 00:39, Grant Edwards via Python-list wrote:
Definitely. Syntactic e-mail address "validation" is one of the most
useless and widely broken things on the Interwebs. People who do
anything other than require an '@' (and optionally make you enter the
same @-containing string twice) are deluding themselves.
And don't get me started on phone number validation.
I can see how the truley dim-witted might forget that other countries
have phone numbers with differing lengths and formatting/punctuation,
but there are tons of sites where it takes multiple tries when
entering even a bog-standard USA 10-0digit phone nubmer because they
are completely flummuxed by an area code in parens or hyphens in the
usual places (or lack of hyhpens in the usual places). This stuff
isn't that hard, people...
On 2023-11-05 00:39, Grant Edwards via Python-list wrote:
Definitely. Syntactic e-mail address "validation" is one of the most
useless and widely broken things on the Interwebs. People who do
anything other than require an '@' (and optionally make you enter the
same @-containing string twice) are deluding themselves.
And don't get me started on phone number validation.
The most annoying thing to me, though, is sites that reject names
that have an apostrophe in them. I hate being told that my name,
that I have been using for over seventy years, is invalid.
OK, now that I am started, what else? Oh yah. Look at your credit
card. The number has spaces in it. Why do I have to remove them. If
you don't like them then you are a computer, just remove them.
When do we stop working for computers and have the computers start
working for us?
Indeed. There is a tiny but brightly burning kernel of hate in my
heart for web sites (and their developers) that refuse to accept
credit card numbers entered with spaces _as_they_are_shown_on_the_card_!
I've concluded that using PHP causes debilitating and irreversible
brain damage.
Sometimes I think that these sorts of stupid, wrong, validation are the
fault of idiot managers. When it's apostrophes though I'm suspicious
that it may be idiot programmers who don't know how to prevent SQL
injection attacks without just saying "ban all apostrophes everywhere".
Or perhaps it's idiot "security consultancies" who make it a tick-box requirement.
OK, now that I am started, what else? Oh yah. Look at your credit
card. The number has spaces in it. Why do I have to remove them. If
you don't like them then you are a computer, just remove them.
Yes, this is also very stupid and annoying. Does nobody who works for
the companies making these sorts of websites ever use their own, or
indeed anyone else's, website?
Honestly I don't understand why every web application platform doesn't automatically strip all leading and trailing whitespace on user input
by default. It's surely incredibly rare that it's sensible to preserve
it. (I see Django eventually got around to this in version 1.9.)
Gotta wonder for sure. It could also be the case of programmers
depending on user input but the users insist on living with the bugs
and/or working around them. We made crash reporting dead simple to
report on and still users didn't bother. We would get the traceback and
have to guess what the user was doing.
I can see how the truley dim-witted might forget that other countries
have phone numbers with differing lengths and formatting/punctuation,
but there are tons of sites where it takes multiple tries when
entering even a bog-standard USA 10-0digit phone nubmer because they
are completely flummuxed by an area code in parens or hyphens in the
usual places (or lack of hyhpens in the usual places). This stuff
isn't that hard, people...
On 2023-11-05 06:48, Jon Ribbens via Python-list wrote:
Sometimes I think that these sorts of stupid, wrong, validation are the
fault of idiot managers. When it's apostrophes though I'm suspicious
that it may be idiot programmers who don't know how to prevent SQL
injection attacks without just saying "ban all apostrophes everywhere".
Or perhaps it's idiot "security consultancies" who make it a tick-box
requirement.
https://xkcd.com/327/
OK, now that I am started, what else? Oh yah. Look at your credit
card. The number has spaces in it. Why do I have to remove them. If
you don't like them then you are a computer, just remove them.
Yes, this is also very stupid and annoying. Does nobody who works for
the companies making these sorts of websites ever use their own, or
indeed anyone else's, website?
Gotta wonder for sure. It could also be the case of programmers
depending on user input but the users insist on living with the bugs
and/or working around them. We made crash reporting dead simple to
report on and still users didn't bother. We would get the traceback and
have to guess what the user was doing.
The thing I truly hate is when you have two telephone number fields. One for landline and one for mobile. I mean who in hell has a landline these days?
On 11/6/23 01:57, Simon Connah via Python-list wrote:
The thing I truly hate is when you have two telephone number fields.
One for landline and one for mobile. I mean who in hell has a
landline these days?
People who live in places with spotty, or no, mobile coverage. We do
exist.
a landline only field that does not accept mobile phones.I can see how the truley dim-witted might forget that other countries
have phone numbers with differing lengths and formatting/punctuation,
but there are tons of sites where it takes multiple tries when
entering even a bog-standard USA 10-0digit phone nubmer because they
are completely flummuxed by an area code in parens or hyphens in the
usual places (or lack of hyhpens in the usual places). This stuff
isn't that hard, people...
The thing I truly hate is when you have two telephone number fields. One for landline and one for mobile. I mean who in hell has a landline these days? And not accepting your mobile number in the landline number field is just when I give up. Or having
That was another thing that I used to find ridiculous, but seems to have improved somewhat in recent years - website error pages that said "please contact us to let us know about this error". I'm sorry, what? You want
me to contact you to tell you about what your own website is doing? How
does that make any sense? Websites should be self-reporting problems.
On 2023-11-06, Mats Wichmann <mats@wichmann.us> wrote:
On 11/6/23 01:57, Simon Connah via Python-list wrote:
The thing I truly hate is when you have two telephone number fields.
One for landline and one for mobile. I mean who in hell has a
landline these days?
People who live in places with spotty, or no, mobile coverage. We do
exist.
Catering for people in minority situations is, of course, important.
Catering for people in the majority situation is probably important too.
Suggests maybe labeling should be something like:
* Number you want to be called on
* Number for texted security messages, if different
Never seen that, though :-)
We've found even if you directly ask the user often the answer is 'I
dunno' or some mythology they have constructed to explain the problem.
Continuing with the example, if you have a single phone number field, or
let a mobile number be entered in a field marked for landline, you will probably assume you can text to that number.
On 7/11/23 7:45 am, Mats Wichmann wrote:
Continuing with the example, if you have a single phone number field, or let a mobile number be entered in a field marked for landline, you will probably assume you can text to that number.
But if the site can detect that you've entered a mobile number into
the landline field or vice versa and reject it, then it can figure out whether it can text to a given numner or not without you having
to tell it!
On 6/11/23 6:34 pm, rbowman wrote:
We've found even if you directly ask the user often the answer is 'I
dunno' or some mythology they have constructed to explain the problem.
This seems to apply to hardware issues as well. Louis Rossmann has a philosophy of "Never believe what the customer tells you."
On 7/11/23 7:45 am, Mats Wichmann wrote:
Continuing with the example, if you have a single phone number field, or let a mobile number be entered in a field marked for landline, you will probably assume you can text to that number.
But if the site can detect that you've entered a mobile number into
the landline field or vice versa and reject it, then it can figure out whether it can text to a given numner or not without you having
to tell it!
On 7/11/23 7:45 am, Mats Wichmann wrote:
Continuing with the example, if you have a single phone number field, or
let a mobile number be entered in a field marked for landline, you will
probably assume you can text to that number.
But if the site can detect that you've entered a mobile number into
the landline field or vice versa and reject it, then it can figure out whether it can text to a given numner or not without you having
to tell it!
If you, as a web developer, want the user to enter a text-message
capable phone number, then ASK FOR THAT!
If you, as a web developer, want the user to enter a text-message
capable phone number, then ASK FOR THAT!
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