How should I validate an e-mail address?

Question

What\'s a good technique for validating an e-mail address (e.g. from a user input field) in Android? org.apache.commons.validator.routines.EmailValidator doesn\'t seem to be

Answer 1

The key here is that you want to fully validate the email address. You don’t just want to check it for syntactic correctness, you want to check whether the email address is real.

Two obvious reasons: real users often mis-type their email addresses, and some users may put in fake email addresses. Therefore, you want to do a syntactic check and an existence check.

The best way to do this that I have found on Android is to use the free Cloudmersive Validation API for this.

The code looks like this:

ApiClient defaultClient = Configuration.getDefaultApiClient();

// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
ApiKeyAuth Apikey = (ApiKeyAuth) defaultClient.getAuthentication("Apikey");
Apikey.setApiKey("YOUR API KEY");

EmailApi apiInstance = new EmailApi();
String email = "email_example"; // String | Email address to validate, e.g. \"support@cloudmersive.com\". The input is a string so be sure to enclose it in double-quotes.
try {
    FullEmailValidationResponse result = apiInstance.emailFullValidation(email);
    System.out.println(result);
} catch (ApiException e) {
    System.err.println("Exception when calling EmailApi#emailFullValidation");
    e.printStackTrace();
}

I’m using this in all my apps and it is great because I can validate the email addresses in the UX at the point of entry.