[[Explain why it's bad idea.  Always.  Point to Friedl RE,
link to REs, refer to Perl FAQ, and ...]]


One reason this concept is a bad idea - just because a string of characters could, potentially, be an email address does NOT mean that the email address is a valid one.  The closest thing that one can do to 'validate' that an email address exists is to send it mail and then to receive mail back in a way that when you parse it, it appears to be valid.  Note that even THAT isn't guaranteed.




Pertinent Perl stuff:
   * ASPN Cookbook 68432 http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Rx/Recipe/68432
   * lyris.com validator http://www.lyris.com/help/HowdoIvalidateEmailAddressesinmyPerlprograms_.html
   * miscellaneous CPAN stuff, including Mail::RFC822::Address





[Don Libes] wrote
"Authentication by Email Reception"
[http://www.nist.gov/msidlibrary/doc/libes96b.pdf]
to describe "use of email addresses as an authentication mechanism
... [[which]] provides reasonable security at very low cost ..."


[tcllib] / [mime] contains commands (mime::parseaddress, mostly) to parse email addresses.

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But mime::parseaddress fails (by fail, do you mean does not perform functions it is defined to do - or does it mean does not perform functions that '''you''' want it to do?) on simple, common cases. Specifically, it fails for some fairly typical user input:

     somebody@some.org,someoneelse@other.com

is OK but mime::parseaddress seems unable to deal with

     somebody@some.org someoneelse@other.com

Then, when I try to stress it and send mail to

     foo<>bar@grill.com

The parse "succeeds" but the send fails. -- [CLN]

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Please report such things as either bugs or feature requests at
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=12883 (tcllib trackers)