regular expression for email validation in Java

Question

I am using the follwoing regular expression

(".+@.+\\.[a-z]+")

Bit it accepts #@#.com as a valid email. What's the pattern I should use?

Answer 1

You should use apache-commons email validator. You can get the jar file from here.

Here is a simple example of how to use it:

import org.apache.commons.validator.routines.EmailValidator;

boolean isValidEmail = EmailValidator.getInstance().isValid(emailAddress);

Answer 2

Here's a web page that explains that better than I can: http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html (EDIT: that appears to be a bit out of date since it refers to RFC 2822, which has been superseded by RFC 5322)

And another with an interesting take on the problem of validation: http://www.markussipila.info/pub/emailvalidator.php

Generally the best strategy for validating an email address is to just try sending mail to it.