Spaces in email addresses are accepted

[snoyberg]

Example: michael @snoyman.com is an accepted email address. I ran into an issue where our validated email addresses were rejected by Amazon SES.

[Porges]

Unfortunately this is a legitimate email address.

I think that stripping whitespace & comments should be permitted by the spec, so I'm thinking of doing that by default - very few people will need access to that information.

I have an experimental version that I can upload to GitHub in an hour or so.

By the way, I presume that you're using ByteStrings internally? If I swap out Parsec for Attoparsec I will also be able to drop the dependency on 'ranges'.

[Porges]

I've committed the experimental version in a new branch: d6083cb

Changes are:

• Attoparsec is now the dependency instead of Parsec - ByteStrings are now the input
• EmailAddress is now an abstract type, emailAddress is its smart constructor
• comments and whitespace are dropped from the input email as it is parsed into an EmailAddress
• there is a utility method canonicalizeEmail that will give you an email as a ByteString without comments or whitespace (if it is valid)
• the Ranges dependency has been removed

Please let me know if this suits your use case, or if the dependency on Attoparsec is problematic. In the mean time I'm going make a proper test suite before I merge this back in. This will be a new major version as it is backwards-incompatible.

[Porges]

Example:

 > canonicalizeEmail $ BS.pack "michael @snoyman.com"
Just "michael@snoyman.com"

[snoyberg]

This seems to work perfectly, thanks! FWIW, I'm actually using Text, not ByteString, but I can handle character encoding issues.

Thank you for getting this patch out so quickly.

[Porges]

Yes, I'm using ByteString instead of Text to indicate that it's ASCII. It also avoids putting a dependency on Text. (For the benefit of anyone else who might read this: you'll need to convert it using decodeUtf8.)

There should really be a separate type for this purpose...

I'm not sure if you found it already, but this version is on Hackage as email-validate-1.0.0.

[snoyberg]

Yep, I've found it and am already using it :).

Yes, the age-old ASCII issue. I tried to address this once with an Ascii newtype wrapper, but it was such a pain and there was so much pushback that I gave up and I just do exactly what you did here.