A simple Ruby EmailAddress class

Question

I wrote this short, plain Ruby lib to handle email address validation inside and outside of Rails applications, and I would like to know what you think.

require "i18n"

class EmailAddress
  VALID_EMAIL_ADDRESS_REGEX = /\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-.]+\.[a-z]+\z/i

  def self.malformed?(email)
    email !~ VALID_EMAIL_ADDRESS_REGEX
  end

  def self.valid?(email)
    !malformed?(email)
  end

  attr_reader :email, :i18n_scope, :errors

  def initialize(email, i18n_scope: [:models, :email_address])
    @email = email
    @i18n_scope = i18n_scope
    @errors = []
  end

  def valid?
    validate
    errors.empty?
  end

  def validate
    message = I18n.t(:invalid, scope: i18n_scope)
    errors.push(message) if EmailAddress.malformed?(email)
  end
end

Usage can be as simple as:

if EmailAddress.valid?(params[:email))
  # do something
end

Or for remote validations, for example:

def email
  email = EmailAddress.new(params[:email])
  if email.valid?
    render nothing: true, status: 200
  else
    render json: { errors: email.errors }, status: 422
  end
end

Answer 1

The Regex will validate some email addresses. Because the Domain Name System allows UniCode. the Regex does not match all valid characters in the Doman Name. Therefore it will not validate all valid email addresses.

Alternatives:

Validating over all allowable Unicode with Regex in a meaningful way is non-trivial.

1. Sending a confirmation email requiring reply is a straight-forward method for validating email procedurally.

2. When possible, not collecting email addresses at all is easy to implement.