EmailInquire

EmailInquire is a library to validate email for common typos and one-time email providers.

Why?

Before an user is an user, it's a visitor. And he must register to be so. What if he makes a typo while entering its email address during the registration ? If he didn't notice, you just lost him. He won't be able to sign in next time.

Your users :

may not be as tech saavy as you;
may not remember exactly their email address;
may make a typo while typing their email address (very very common on a mobile keyboard).

While we can't do so much for the name part of the email address, for the domain part, we can be smart!

And also, we don't want for users to use one-time email addresses (also called burner email addresses).

Supported cases

One char typo for 43 common email providers of France, United Kingdom and USA:

gmil.com => hint gmail.com
hitmail.com => hint hotmail.com
outloo.com => hint outlook.com
virinmedia.com => hint virginmedia.com
...

United Kingdom .xx.uk domains:

foo.couk => hint foo.co.uk
fooco.uk => hint foo.co.uk
foo.uk => hint foo.co.uk
foo.judiciary.uk => ok!
...

Providers with an unique domain:

gmail.fr => hint gmail.com
gmail.de => hint gmail.com
google.com => hint gmail.com
free.com => hint free.fr
laposte.com => hint laposte.net
laposte.fr => hint laposte.net
...

1375 one-time email providers (a.k.a. burners, source):

yopmail.com => invalid
...

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'email_inquire'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install email_inquire

Usage

Use EmailInquire.validate(email), you'll get a EmailInquire::Response that represents weither or not the email address is valid or may contain a mistake.

Methods of EmailInquire::Response:

Method	Description	Possible values
`#email`	The validated email address	`"john.doe@gnail.com"`
`#status`	The status of the validation	`:valid` `:invalid` or `:hint`
`#valid?`	Is the email valid ?	`true` or `false`
`#invalid?`	Is the email invalid ?	`true` or `false`
`#hint?`	Is there a possible mistake and you have to show a hint to the user ?	`true` or `false`
`#replacement`	A proposal replacement email address for when status is `:hint`	`"john.doe@gmail.com"` or nil

Examples

A valid case:

response = EmailInquire.validate("john.doe@gmail.com")
response.status # :valid
response.valid? # true

An invalid case:

response = EmailInquire.validate("john.doe@yopmail.com")
response.status   # :invalid
response.valid?   # false
response.invalid? # true

A hint case:

response = EmailInquire.validate("john.doe@gmail.co")
response.status      # :hint
response.valid?      # false
response.hint?       # true
response.replacement # "john.doe@gmail.com"

Hint

I think it's important to just offer a hint to the user and to not automatically replace the maybe faulty email address in the form.

A "Did you mean xxx@yyy.zzz ?" has the following advantages:

user remains in charge: we could have hinted against a perfectly valid email;
user is educated;
mini whaoo effect;

This "Did you mean xxx@yyy.zzz ?" is better being actionable, and appearing to be so: a click or tap on it should replace the email by the suggestion.

  +---------------------------------------+  +---------+
  | john.doe@yaho.com                     |  | Sign Up |
  +---------------------------------------+  +---------+
    Did you mean john.doe@yahoo.com ?

Note that you could even have this validation for your Sign In form...

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/maximeg/email_inquire.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

mallikarjunayaddala / email_inquire