How to check for valid email address?

The Python standard library comes with an e-mail parsing function: email.utils.parseaddr().

It returns a two-tuple containing the real name and the actual address parts of the e-mail:

>>> from email.utils import parseaddr
>>> parseaddr('[email protected]')
('', '[email protected]')

>>> parseaddr('Full Name <[email protected]>')
('Full Name', '[email protected]')

>>> parseaddr('"Full Name with quotes and <[email protected]>" <[email protected]>')
('Full Name with quotes and <[email protected]>', '[email protected]')

And if the parsing is unsuccessful, it returns a two-tuple of empty strings:

>>> parseaddr('[invalid!email]')
('', '')

An issue with this parser is that it's accepting of anything that is considered as a valid e-mail address for RFC-822 and friends, including many things that are clearly not addressable on the wide Internet:

>>> parseaddr('invalid@example,com') # notice the comma
('', 'invalid@example')

>>> parseaddr('invalid-email')
('', 'invalid-email')

So, as @TokenMacGuy put it, the only definitive way of checking an e-mail address is to send an e-mail to the expected address and wait for the user to act on the information inside the message.

However, you might want to check for, at least, the presence of an @-sign on the second tuple element, as @bvukelic suggests:

>>> '@' in parseaddr("invalid-email")[1]
False

If you want to go a step further, you can install the dnspython project and resolve the mail servers for the e-mail domain (the part after the '@'), only trying to send an e-mail if there are actual MX servers:

>>> from dns.resolver import query
>>> domain = 'foo@[email protected]'.rsplit('@', 1)[-1]
>>> bool(query(domain, 'MX'))
True
>>> query('example.com', 'MX')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  [...]
dns.resolver.NoAnswer
>>> query('not-a-domain', 'MX')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  [...]
dns.resolver.NXDOMAIN

You can catch both NoAnswer and NXDOMAIN by catching dns.exception.DNSException.

And Yes, foo@[email protected] is a syntactically valid address. Only the last @ should be considered for detecting where the domain part starts.

Email addresses are not as simple as they seem! For example, Bob_O'[email protected], is a valid email address.

I've had some luck with the lepl package (http://www.acooke.org/lepl/). It can validate email addresses as indicated in RFC 3696: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3696.html

Found some old code:

import lepl.apps.rfc3696
email_validator = lepl.apps.rfc3696.Email()
if not email_validator("[email protected]"):
    print "Invalid email"

There is no point. Even if you can verify that the email address is syntactically valid, you'll still need to check that it was not mistyped, and that it actually goes to the person you think it does. The only way to do that is to send them an email and have them click a link to verify.

Therefore, a most basic check (e.g. that they didn't accidentally entered their street address) is usually enough. Something like: it has exactly one @ sign, and at least one . in the part after the @:

[^@]+@[^@]+\.[^@]+

You'd probably also want to disallow whitespace -- there are probably valid email addresses with whitespace in them, but I've never seen one, so the odds of this being a user error are on your side.

If you want the full check, have a look at this question.

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Update: Here's how you could use any such regex:

import re

if not re.match(r"... regex here ...", email):
  # whatever

Python ≥3.4 has re.fullmatch which is preferable to re.match.

Note the r in front of the string; this way, you won't need to escape things twice.

If you have a large number of regexes to check, it might be faster to compile the regex first:

import re

EMAIL_REGEX = re.compile(r"... regex here ...")

if not EMAIL_REGEX.match(email):
  # whatever

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Another option is to use the validate_email package, which actually contacts the SMTP server to verify that the address exists. This still doesn't guarantee that it belongs to the right person, though.

I haven't seen the answer already here among the mess of custom Regex answers, but...

There exists a python library called py3-validate-email validate_email which has 3 levels of email validation, including asking a valid SMTP server if the email address is valid (without sending an email).

To install

python -m pip install py3-validate-email

Basic usage:

from validate_email import validate_email
is_valid = validate_email(email_address='[email protected]', \
    check_regex=True, check_mx=True, \
    from_address='[email protected]', helo_host='my.host.name', \ 
    smtp_timeout=10, dns_timeout=10, use_blacklist=True)

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For those interested in the dirty details, validate_email.py (source) aims to be faithful to RFC 2822.

All we are really doing is comparing the input string to one gigantic regular expression. But building that regexp, and ensuring its correctness, is made much easier by assembling it from the "tokens" defined by the RFC. Each of these tokens is tested in the accompanying unit test file.

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you may need the pyDNS module for checking SMTP servers

pip install pyDNS

or from Ubuntu

apt-get install python3-dns