How does Salesforce.com validate Email Fields? - salesforce

Question

I'm trying to store email addresses in Salesforce.com from another service that allows invalid email addresses to be specified. If one of those bad invalid email addresses is sent to Salesforce.com via their Web Services API, Salesforce.com will prevent the record from saving with an INVALID_EMAIL_ADDRESS error code.
I can't find any documentation on how to disable validation on Email fields, so it looks like I'll need to validate them in my integration and pull out those that fail. Does anyone know the validation process Salesforce.com uses to determine if an email address is valid? All I have right now is a Regex, but I'd like it to match Salesforce.com's process.
EDIT: For reference, here is my Regex (I'm using C#/.NET):
^(\w|[!#$%'*+-/=?^_`\{\}~.&])+#\w+([-.]\w+)*\.\w+([-.]\w+)*([,;]\s*\w+([-+.]\w+)*#\w+([-.]\w+)*\.\w+([-.]\w+)*)*$

Answer 1

Summary: we're using the following .NET RegEx:
const string SFEmailRegExPattern = #"^[A-Z0-9._%-]+#[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$";
If you can believe SF's own documentation then:
For the local part of the email address we accept the following characters. The local part is anything before the # sign.
abcdefg.hijklmnopqrstuvwxyz!#$%&'*/=?^_+-`{|}~0123456789
Note: The character dot . is supported; provided that it is not the first or last character in the local-part
For the domain part of the email address we accept. The domain part is anything after the # in an email address:
0-9 and A-Z and a-z and dash -
A couple of people have coded this up as a Java regex as:
String pat = '[a-zA-Z0-9\\.\\!\\#\\$\\%\\&\\*\\/\\=\\?\\^\\_\\+\\-\\`\\{\\|\\}\\~\'._%+-]+#[a-zA-Z0-9\\-.-]+\\.[a-zA-Z]+';
although to me this looks like it fails to reject an email that starts with a "." so isn't perfect.

Answer 2

I don't know how salesforce.com is validating email addresses, but since you are using .NET I'd suggest you to consider an email validation component like our EmailVerify.NET, which is 100% compliant with the current IETF standards (RFC 1123, RFC 2821, RFC 2822, RFC 3490, RFC 3696, RFC 4291, RFC 5321, RFC 5322 and RFC 5336) and does not suffer from ReDoS: if needed, it even checks the DNS records of the email domain under test, its SMTP availability, validates the related mailbox and can even tell if the target mail exchanger is a catch-all or if it is a disposable/free email address provider.

Answer 3

I don't know what salesforce.com uses (and I don't think there's any way for you to find out), but \b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+#[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b from here is a commmon one and should work for most of the cases.

Answer 4

I've looked previously and not been able to find a definitive answer on exactly which rules SFDC applies to the native "Email" field type. The quickest path to success that I would suggest would be this:
in your initial data integration from the external application, map the email field that you describe into a new (non-email, just text 255) custom field in SFDC.
if this is a one-time dataload, run a separate process that, for every row in SFDC with this custom field populated, attempts to copy the contents of this custom field to the native email field. If any row fails with the email validation error, you just skip it. Then you can decide what to do with the non-compliant addresses.
if this is an ongoing integration, it may be better to do something like attempt to insert new rows one-at-a-time via WS API, and if the email validation exception is thrown, you catch it and either insert the record without an email address, store the bad email in a different field (like a custom field called "non-compliant email address"), or skip the row altogether (if bad emails == bad record).
Hope that helps.

Answer 5

Apex has native Pattern and Matcher classes, based on java.
You can validate your email addresses in Apex code, using your RegEx expression as a string
String emailPattern = {your regex expression);
Boolean validEmail = pattern.match(emailPattern, emailAddress);

Answer 6

You can't definitely create common regex for salesforce email, due to inconsistency of their own requirements.
The one rule is about to give possibilities to put IP address after the local part. Example -> email#123.123.123.123.
The second is about do not allow digits in top-level domain.
For example: test#test.com1
So, they are mutually excluded.
But as I understood the email address with IP after the local part is more important and commonly used comparing with numbers in top-level domain.
Here is some examples of valid/invalid emails for salesforce.
Valid:
a#ua.fm
email#domain.com
firstname.lastname#domain.com
email#subdomain.domain.com
firstname+lastname#domain.com
email#123.123.123.123
1234567890#domain.com
email#domain-one.com
_______#domain.com
email#domain.name
email#buyacar.co.uk
ail#github.dennis.co.uk
email#news.i.ua
firstname-lastname#domain.com
Alexka1!+1123klsn&*^%$%$#^^^#a3432.4s.c4p.uk
frw...??//||/wt'f`fe#wfwfg-----wfwef.mm
a..#test.jp
abcdefg.hijklmnopqrstuvwxyz!#$%&'*/=?^_+-`{|}~0123456789#acme-inc.com
Invalid:
aasd#sdfжжж.rf
plainaddress
##%^%#$##$##.com
#domain.com
email.domain.com
email#domain#domain.com
.email#domain.com
あいうえお#domain.com
email#domain.com (Joe Smith)
email#domain
email#domain..com
email#domain.com.e
email#domain.com.33
As result of above, the final regex is:
/^(?!\.)(([^<>()\[\]\\a-zA-Z0-9.,;:\s#"]*(\.[^<>()\[\]\\.,;:\s#"]+)*)|(".+"))[a-zA-Z0-9.!#$%&'‘*+\/=?^_{|}~-]+#[\w.-?]+.[A-Za-z]*(?

Answer 7

Here is a regular expression based on this help page + a lot of experimenting in Salesforce:
^(?=(?:\([^)]*\))*[^()]+[^#]*#)(?!(?:\([^)]*\))*\.)(?:(?:[\w!#$%&'*+-/=?^`{|}~]|\([\w!#$%&'*+-/=?^`{|}~]*\))+|"(?:[\w!#$%&'*+-/=?^`{|}~]|\([\w!#$%&'*+-/=?^`{|}~]*\))*")#(?:\([A-Za-z0-9-]*\))*(?:(?:[A-Za-z0-9]+|[A-Za-z0-9]+(?:\([A-Za-z0-9-]*\))*-(?:\([A-Za-z0-9-]*\))*[A-Za-z0-9]+)(?:\([A-Za-z0-9-]*\))*)(?:\.(?:\([A-Za-z0-9-]*\))*(?:(?:[A-Za-z0-9]+|[A-Za-z0-9]+(?:\([A-Za-z0-9-]*\))*-(?:\([A-Za-z0-9-]*\))*[A-Za-z0-9]+)(?:\([A-Za-z0-9-]*\))*))+$
See this Demo. It gives the same validation result as Salesforce for all the values I could think of testing - copied below - any counter examples are welcome...
************* VALID *************
a#a.a
-#a.a
a#1.a
a#a-a.a
a#a.a-a
!#$%&'*+-/=?^_`{|}~#test.jp
a..a#test.jp
a..#test.jp
"a"#test.jp
""#test.jp
(comment)(comment)a(comment)(comment)(comment)#(comment)a.a
(comment)(comment)a.(comment)(comment)(comment)#(comment)a.a
(comment)(comment)a(comment).(comment)(comment)#(comment)a.a
a#(comment)a(comment)-(comment)a(comment).a
john.doe#(-comment)example.com
john.doe#example.com(comment-)
()a#test.jp
(a)a#test.jp
a(a)#test.jp
a#(a)test.jp
a#test.jp(a)
simple#example.com
very.common#example.com
disposable.style.email.with+symbol#example.com
other.email-with-hyphen#example.com
fully-qualified-domain#example.com
user.name+tag+sorting#example.com
x#example.com
example-indeed#strange-example.com
test/test#test.com
example#s.example
"john..doe"#example.org
mailhost!username#example.org
user%example.com#example.org
user-#example.org
1#1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234.1.2.3.4.5.6.7
************* INVALID *************
a#a
a#a.
a#-a.a
a#a-.a
a#a.a-
a#a.-a
a;a#test.jp
.a#test.jp
";"#test.jp
"#"#test.jp
"a#test.jp
a"#test.jp
a""#test.jp
""a#test.jp
()#test.jp
)(a#test.jp
(a)#test.jp
(a#test.jp
(())a#test.jp
(comment)(comment).(comment)a(comment)(comment)#(comment)a.a
john.doe#(comment).com
a#(comment)a(comment)-(comment)(comment).a
Αθήνα#email.com
admin#mailserver1
" "#example.org
"very.(),:;<>[]\".VERY.\"very#\\ \"very\".unusual"#strange.example.com
postmaster#[123.123.123.123]
postmaster#[IPv6:2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334]