Validate Email Addresses

Ensuring you have data that makes sense is why Rails provides validations through the Active Model library, which underpins Active Record.

I'm co-chairing RailsConf 2024 in Detroit May 7–9.
Come and join us →

Making sure you can email your users is one of the most important things to get right in your application, so you probably already have validation checks around your User#email attribute.

Instead of…

…inventing your own regular expression, or using this one from the older Rails docs:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  validates :email,
    format: { with: /\A([^@\s]+)@((?:[-a-z0-9]+\.)+[a-z]{2,})\z/i },
    presence: true,
    uniqueness: { case_insensitive: true }
end

Use…

…one of these several better options:

Devise

A reasonable choice, if you’re already using it for user authentication.

class User < ApplicationRecord
  validates :email,
    format: { with: Devise.email_regexp },
    presence: true,
    uniqueness: { case_insensitive: true }
end

URI

There has been a regular expression built into the URI of Ruby‘s standard library since version 2.2. Here’s the commit adding it.

class User < ApplicationRecord
  validates :email,
    format: { with: URI::MailTo::EMAIL_REGEXP },
    presence: true,
    uniqueness: { case_insensitive: true }
end

It’s been in some of the Rails Guides examples.

email_address gem

The validator from the email_address gem has other useful enhancements for working with email.

You can use the built-in validator:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  validates :email,
    presence: true,
    uniqueness: { case_insensitive: true }

  # attribute needs to be called :email
  validates_with EmailAddress::ActiveRecordValidator
end

Or directly use the gem‘s functionality in a validate block:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  validates :email,
    presence: true,
    uniqueness: { case_insensitive: true }

  validate do |user|
    EmailAddress::Address.new(user.email).valid?
  end
end

Or use a custom validator:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  validates :email,
    email: true,
    presence: true,
    uniqueness: { case_insensitive: true }

  private

  # You can put this in its own file if you check elsewhere for email validity
  class EmailValidator < ActiveModel::EachValidator
    def validate_each(record, attribute, value)
      unless EmailAddress::Address.new(value).valid?
        record.errors.add attribute, (options[:message] || "is not an email")
      end
    end
  end
end

Why?

Email formatting is a solved problem. Re-solving solved problems always feels like madness to me. Why would you not lean on the experience of the entire Internet for something as common as this?

There are various levels of strictness in the regular expressions that underpin the different options I listed above. Most of them are “healthily conventional” in comparison to the official RFC format of emails, which can allow overly unrealistic, but RFC-valid, machine-generated email addresses.

If I were to pick, I’d choose the straightforward URI option. The underlying regular expression is sufficiently flexible for all regular use.

If my application needed further email manipulation functionality—detection, normalisation or deconstruction–I’d be tempted to include the email_address gem and use it for validation too.

If I were validating emails in multiple other places in my application I would certainly consider the—reusable—custom validator approach instead.

Why not?

The different levels of strictness (and differences in the underlying regular expressions) provided by the options above might cause validation issues for existing records if you’ve been using a hand-rolled option and then change the specifications of email validation.

However, it might still be worth doing the work to make sure all your email addresses do validate with the new regular expression.

If you’re starting a new app, just pick one of the decent solutions over doing your own thing, unless you have very specific email requirements that fall outside of conventional use.

Still running UK’s friendliest, Ruby event on Friday 28th June.
Ice cream + Ruby →