yapcasia
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2011–2021
39:42 · 7.9K views · Oct 21, 2011
Ricardo Signes' YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2011 talk on the legends and horrors of email: how messy the SMTP and email standards are in practice. The first few minutes are Perl-specific, but the rest applies to anyone handling email.
HN points people to it as a funny and sobering warning about why parsing, validating, or implementing email software is far harder than it looks.
4 comments from Hacker News
There is is awesome talk about E-Mail by Ricardo Signes: this video The first 5 minutes are perl specific, but the rest is email and just hilarious.
I found this talk by Ricardo Signes on email parsing to be an excellent primer into why email addresses (and emails in general) are terrible to parse: this video
The SMTP standard is complicated and crazy. RJBS from Pobox does a good job of scaring anyone thinking of writing an SMTP client or server: this video
Fun is a very curious way of putting it, considering how batshit crazy IMAP is. The rest of the involved email standards are also a huge dumpster fire. I'll let Ricardo Signes do the talking: this video