Concerns about e-mail validation [Prestashop/One page checkout]

[mpa1]

Just had a couple of experiences with prestashop/One page checkout I would love to avoid, the way prestashop/One page checkout is checking if an email is valid, is not living up to what I am used to.

A normal thing to do is to validate if the domain first of all got an mx record, it looks like prestashop is not doing this ad all, we just had a costumer entering Hotmail.con instead of .com and it validated that, I would normally use checkdnsrr, and filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL).

Just wondering why leave something flawed when there is methods that could help you avoid running in to issues like this?

I am not 100% sure if it’s Prestashop or One Page checkout that’s validating the e-mail, but no matter what it’s flawed, and I need to figure out a way to either edit the core and ad some sort of better e-mail validation, or find a module that actually ads it.

[Scully]

We have a process running every day that checks possible invalid emails by mx record. However, for small email providers, we sometims see warning / notification messages on possible wrong email addresses which in fact work perfectly.

 

I can imagine this would be a reason not to check the mx recs. However, I am not the mx rec expert.

Edited June 29, 2017 by Scully (see edit history)

[bellini13]

Prestashop only validates that the email is in a valid format, nothing beyond that.

 

You can always submit a forge ticket for an enhancement request, or contribute to github your own solution and see if they will add it

[mpa1]

Thanks for the replys

Just to address Scully’s comments first.

I can in some degree agree with you DNS is not flawless, but it’s the best option there is besides, doing a more advanced check that connects to the receiving e-mails server and ask if the e-mail is real or not.

But the checkdnsrr function in php paired with maybe ANY instead of MX, just to look up if a domain got a DNS record, is better than the basic check that prestashop dos now.

Besides that I am wondering why they don’t use filter_var with the FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL option, it should do the same as the current way of checking if it’s a valid email just using php own function for it.

To bellini13,

I am actually thinking about it, since I feel it could be optimized a bit and do a bit more of checking to avoid costumers being able to order when they did a small mistake when they entered their email.

[Scully]

All these problems in mind we decided to run a check every 24 hours. So the user is not stopped ordering in cases where the recognition of a correct address could fail. On the other hand, we have alerts that we can track down and call a customer if needen, i.e. if mail adress is effectively wrong.

This is also one reason why we always have one phone number set as mandatory.

Edited June 29, 2017 by Scully (see edit history)

[mpa1]

True, but then again sometimes you miss the bounce, we use Sendgrid for all our mail, and we somehow forgot to turn on the notification if a message bounced, fixed that now.

But still thinking about adding the extra layer might use the service we use to check our exports of mails before migrating them to out email list, using them for other sites that’s not prestashop hehe.

They do a more extensive check, just need to check up on the time it takes, to make sure it does not reply to slowly so the user has to wait to long.