3 HN users recommended this talk3 months2011–2021score 3.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN points people to it as a funny and sobering warning about why parsing, validating, or implementing email software is far harder than it looks.
Ricardo Signes' YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2011 talk on the legends and horrors of email: how messy the SMTP and email standards are in practice. The first few minutes are Perl-specific, but the rest applies to anyone handling email.
“There is is awesome talk about E-Mail by Ricardo Signes” (HN, 2021)
The SMTP standard is complicated and crazy. RJBS from Pobox does a good job of scaring anyone thinking of writing an SMTP client or server: [this video]
Talk showing how complicated and crazy SMTP and email are
I found this talk by Ricardo Signes on email parsing to be an excellent primer into why email addresses (and emails in general) are terrible to parse: [this video]
Primer on why email addresses are terrible to parse
Fun is a very curious way of putting it, considering how batshit crazy IMAP is. The rest of the involved email standards are also a huge dumpster fire. I'll let Ricardo Signes do the talking: [this video]
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