How to validate an email address in PHP

After reading the answers here, this is what I ended up with:

public static function isValidEmail(string $email) : bool
{
    if (!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
        return false;
    }

    //Get host name from email and check if it is valid
    $email_host = array_slice(explode("@", $email), -1)[0];

    // Check if valid IP (v4 or v6). If it is we can't do a DNS lookup
    if (!filter_var($email_host,FILTER_VALIDATE_IP, [
        'flags' => FILTER_FLAG_NO_PRIV_RANGE | FILTER_FLAG_NO_RES_RANGE,
    ])) {
        //Add a dot to the end of the host name to make a fully qualified domain name
        // and get last array element because an escaped @ is allowed in the local part (RFC 5322)
        // Then convert to ascii (http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.idn-to-ascii.php)
        $email_host = idn_to_ascii($email_host.'.');

        //Check for MX pointers in DNS (if there are no MX pointers the domain cannot receive emails)
        if (!checkdnsrr($email_host, "MX")) {
            return false;
        }
    }

    return true;
}

Use below code:

// Variable to check
$email = "john.doe@example.com";

// Remove all illegal characters from email
$email = filter_var($email, FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);


// Validate e-mail
if (filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
  echo("Email is a valid email address");
}

If you want to check if provided domain from email address is valid, use something like:

/*
* Check for valid MX record for given email domain
*/
if(!function_exists('check_email_domain')){
    function check_email_domain($email) {
        //Get host name from email and check if it is valid
        $email_host = explode("@", $email);     
        //Add a dot to the end of the host name to make a fully qualified domain name and get last array element because an escaped @ is allowed in the local part (RFC 5322)
        $host = end($email_host) . "."; 
        //Convert to ascii (http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.idn-to-ascii.php)
        return checkdnsrr(idn_to_ascii($host), "MX"); //(bool)       
    }
}

This is handy way to filter a lot of invalid email addresses, along with standart email validation, because valid email format does not mean valid email.

Note that idn_to_ascii() (or his sister function idn_to_utf8()) function may not be available in your PHP installation, it requires extensions PECL intl >= 1.0.2 and PECL idn >= 0.1.

Also keep in mind that IPv4 or IPv6 as domain part in email (for example user@[IPv6:2001:db8::1]) cannot be validated, only named hosts can.

See more here.

theres is a better regex built in FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL but any regex can give bad results.

For example..

// "not an email" is invalid so its false.
php > var_export(filter_var("not an email", FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL));
false
// "foo@a.com" looks like an email, so it passes even though its not real.
php > var_export(filter_var("foo@a.com", FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL));
'foo@a.com'
// "foo@gmail.com" passes, gmail is a valid email server,
//  but gmail require more than 3 letters for the address.
var_export(filter_var("foo@gmail.com", FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL));
'foo@gmail.com'

You might want to consider using an API like Real Email which can does in depth mailbox inspections to check if the email is real.

A bit like ..

$email = "foo@bar.com";
$api_key = ???;

$request_context = stream_context_create(array(
    'http' => array(
        'header'  => "Authorization: Bearer " . $api_key
    )
));

$result_json = file_get_contents("https://isitarealemail.com/api/email/validate?email=" . $email, false, $request_context);

if (json_decode($result_json, true)['status'] == "valid") {
    echo("email is valid");
} else if (json_decode($result_json, true)['status'] == "invalid") {
    echo("email is invalid");
} else {
  echo("email was unknown");
}

There are three RFCs that lay down the foundation for the "Internet Message Format".

1. RFC 822
2. RFC 2822 (Supersedes RFC 822)
3. RFC 5322 (Supersedes RFC 2822)

The RFC 5322, however, defines the e-mail IDs and their naming structure in the most technical manner. That is more suitable laying down the foundation an Internet Standard that liberal enough to allow all the use-cases yet, conservative enough to bind it in some formalism.

However, the e-mail validation requirement from the software developer community, has the following needs -

• to stave off unwanted spammers
• to ensure the user does not make inadvertent mistake
• to ensure that the e-mail ID belongs to the actual person inputting it

They are not exactly interested in implementing a technically all-encompassing definition that allows all the forms (IP addresses, including port IDs and all) of e-mail id. The solution suitable for their use-case is expected to solely ensure that all the legitimate e-mail holders should be able to get through. The definition of "legitimate" differs vastly from technical stand-point (RFC 5322 way) to usability stand-point(this solution). The usability aspect of the validation aims to ensure that all the e-mail IDs validated by the validation mechanism belong to actual people, using them for their communication purposes. This, thus introduces another angle to the validation process, ensuring an actually "in-use" e-mail ID, a requirement for which RFC-5322 definition is clearly not sufficient.

Thus, on practical grounds, the actual requirements boil down to this -

1. To ensure some very basic validation checks
2. To ensure that the inputted e-mail is in use

Second requirement typically involves, sending a standard response seeking e-mail to the inputted e-mail ID and authenticating the user based on the action delineated in the response mechanism. This is the most widely used mechanism to ensure the second requirement of validating an "in use" e-mail ID. This does involve round-tripping from the back-end server implementation and is not a straight-forward single-screen implementaion, however, one cannot do away with this.

The first requirement, stems from the need that the developers do not want totally "non e-mail like" strings to pass as an e-mail. This typically involves blanks, strings without "@" sign or without a domain name. Given the punycode representations of the domain names, if one needs to enable domain validation, they need to engage in full-fledged implementation that ensures a valid domain name. Thus, given the basic nature of requirement in this regard, validating for "<something>@<something>.<something>" is the only apt way of satisfying the requirement.

A typical regex that can satisfy this requirement is: ^[^@\s]+@[^@\s.]+.[^@\s.]+$ The above regex, follows the standard Perl regular-expression standard, widely followed by majority of the programming languages. The validation statement is: <anything except whitespaces and "@" sign>@<anything except whitespaces and "@" sign>.<anything except whitespaces, @ sign and dot>

For those who want to go one step deeper into the more relevant implementations, they can follow the following validation methodology. <e-mail local part>@<domain name>

For <e-mail local part> - Follow the guidelines by the "Universal Acceptance Steering Group" - UASG-026 For <domain name>, you can follow any domain validation methodology using standard libraries, depending on your programming language. For the recent studies on the subject, follow the document UASG-018A.

Those who are interested to know the overall process, challenges and issues one may come across while implementing the Internationalized Email Solution, they can also go through the following RFCs:

RFC 6530 (Overview and Framework for Internationalized Email) RFC 6531 (SMTP Extension for Internationalized Email) RFC 6532 (Internationalized Email Headers) RFC 6533 (Internationalized Delivery Status and Disposition Notifications) RFC 6855 (IMAP Support for UTF-8) RFC 6856 (Post Office Protocol Version 3 (POP3) Support for UTF-8) RFC 6857 (Post-Delivery Message Downgrading for Internationalized Email Messages) RFC 6858 (Simplified POP and IMAP Downgrading for Internationalized Email).

The question title is fairly generic, however the body of the question indicates that it is about the PHP based solution. Will try to address both.

Generically speaking, for all programming languages: Typically, validating" an e-mail address with a reg-ex is something that any internet based service provider should desist from. The possibilities of kinds of domain names and e-mail addresses have increased so much in terms of variety, any attempt at validation, which is not well thought may end up denying some valid users into your system. To avoid this, one of the best ways is to send an email to the user and verify it being received. The good folks at "Universal Acceptance Steering Group" have compiled a languagewise list of libraries which are found to be compliant/non-compliant with various parameters involving validations vis-a-vis Internationalized Domain Names and Internationalized Email addresses. Please find the links to those documents over here and here.

Speaking specifically of PHP: There is one good library available in PHP i.e. EmailValidator. It is an email address validator that includes many validation methods such as DNS validation. The validator specifically recommended is called RFCValidator and validates email addresses against several RFCs. It has good compliance when it comes to being inclusive towards IDNs and Internationalized Email addresses.

I've made Python & PHP implementations of properly verify ANY email address, that is confirmed as real one from the mailserver for the domain that is real.

Released under GPL-3.0 lisence.

There you go:

https://lja.fi/index.php/github-stuff/

--lja

I have prepared a function that checks email validity:

function isValidEmail($email)
{
    $re = '/([\w\-\.]+)@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.)|(([\w-]+\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?)/m';
    preg_match_all($re, $email, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER, 0);
    if(count($matches) > 0) return $matches[0][0] === $email;
    return false;
}

The problem with FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL is that it considers even invalid emails as valid.

Following are example:

if(isValidEmail("foo@gmail.com")) echo "valid";
if(!isValidEmail("fo^o@gmail.com")) echo "invalid";