I also reached out to them on Twitter but they directed me to this form. I followed up with them on Twitter with what happened in this screenshot but they are now ignoring me.

  • Syndic@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    123
    ·
    11 months ago

    Nah, it’s just a old school chat bot following a predefined flow chart. And in this flowchart someone implemented an improper email check.

    It’s pretty much the same as if there was just a website with an email field which then complains about a non valid email which in fact is very valid. And this is pretty common, the official email definition isn’t even properly followed by most mail providers (long video but pretty funny and interesting if you’re interested in the topic).

    • dan@upvote.au
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      You can use symbols like [ ] . { } ~ = | $ in the local-part (bit before the @) of email addresses. They’re all perfectly valid but a lot of email validators reject them. You can even use spaces as long as it’s using quotation marks, like

      "hello world"@example.com
      

      A lot of validators try to do too much. Just strip spaces from the start and end, look for an @ and a ., and send an email to it to validate it. You don’t really care if the email address looks valid; you just care whether it can actually receive email, so that’s what you should be testing for.

      • itsralC@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        11 months ago

        Not even a dot: TLDs are valid email domains. joe@google is a correct address.

        • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          11 months ago

          Mmm… That doesn’t seem right, it’s usually gotta be fully expanded to at least a particular A record/MX.

          How would you tie the tld itself to an MX?

          • TwitchingCheese@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            11
            ·
            11 months ago

            TLD is just another DNS layer, try an SOA or NS lookup for “com.” those are obviously hosted somewhere. Hell the “.” at the end is even another layer with the root nameservers. You’d probably trip up a bunch of systems that filter on common convention rather than the actual RFC, but you could do it.

            • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              11 months ago

              How the hell were the original rfc designers so creative as to result in such a flexible system?? It’s gets crazier the more you look at it.

              • PoolloverNathan@programming.dev
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                11 months ago

                It makes the system as a whole simpler. Your computer only needs to remember one root DNS server (although most computers allow setting 4 for redundancy) as opposed to one DNS server for each TLD, and it also makes adding TLDs easier.

        • PoolloverNathan@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          11 months ago

          A lot of providers support plus‑aliasing, although it‌’‌s usually in a company‌’‌s best interest to block plus‑aliases.

          • dan@upvote.au
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            11 months ago

            + symbols aren’t always used for aliasing though, and companies that strip them out can break the email address. There’s no guarantee that dan+foo@example.com is the same person as dan@example.com.

            I have a catchall domain and used to use email addresses like shopping+amazon@example.com with a Sieve rule to filter it into a “shopping” folder, but these days I just do amazon@example.com without the category or filtering.

      • tomi000@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        11 months ago

        Yea but most of the time its more important to block code injection than to have the last promille of valid mail adresses be accepted.

        • dan@upvote.au
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          11 months ago

          You’re not going to get code injection via an email address field. Just make sure you’re using prepared statements (if you’re using a SQL database) and that you properly escape the email if you output it to a HTML page.

    • Malfeasant@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      11 months ago

      interesting if you’re interested in the topic

      The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.

    • lud@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Yeah that video is great. My favourite part is the Russian post address thing.

      He has a lot of interesting and funny talks like that.

    • force@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Nah, it’s just a old school chat bot following a predefined flow chart.

      yes but that would be an AI still

      • stom@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        11 months ago

        A bunch of IF statements don’t qualify as an AI. That’s not how that works.

        • force@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          I don’t think you know what AI is. A bunch of if statements can, in fact, constitute an AI depending on the context. You don’t know what you’re talking about, stop trying to pretend you do.

          AI is a broad concept, a pathfinding algorithm can be considered AI, a machine learning image generator can be considered AI, a shitty chatbot with predefined responses (like this one) can be considered AI. Reducing something to a stupid sentence like “just a bunch of if statements” to try to make it seem absurd is. I can reduce something like ChatGPT the same way and it’d be pretty much as accurate as your take.

          You can draw any AI as a predefined flowchart, that’s literally the point, they just make decisions based off of data. Large NLP algorithms like ChatGPT are no exception, they’re just very large involving incomparably heavier mathematics.

          This random article can explain it easily for you. https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-vs-machine-learning even this article can portray the many different usages of “artificial intelligence”, it gives multiple definitions none of which are wrong.

          Here is a good stackoverflow answer to it too that actually gives credible sources (including from the people who pioneered AI themselves): https://stackoverflow.com/a/54793198

          AI is very broad. You can use many different definitions of varying specificity to describe AI which can all be correct, even a shitty chatbot counts as AI despite being so basic. There’s no bottom limit for the complexity of AI.

          • stom@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            11 months ago

            Selecting a canned-text response based on simple keywords is a long way from AI, and it’s foolish to equivocate equate the two of them.

            Also, chill tf out, and don’t be so aggressively presumptious. I have enough experience with the topics in question to point out how misleading this statement is.

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        11 months ago

        Even “algorithm”, you could say! The text adventure game I made in BASIC when I was 14 is going to blow your mind. It is 100% artificial and uses logic (IF statements), hence AI!