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Most of the Laravel developers use the default email validation service provided by Laravel. And it does its job to some extent. Our regular email validation looks like this:
'email' => 'required|email|unique:users|max:255'
This default validator checks the string against RFC spec which means it validates whether a string is a valid email address or not.
Is RFC validation enough?
RFC’s perception of email is quite loose in terms of what it means by email. According to RFC, harry@gmail and [email protected] are valid email.
Sending verification email is a solution to this problem but what if a system does not need to verify its user? To address this problem, we need another approach.
DNS Validation
To properly validate emails and filter entered emails like harry@gmail and [email protected], there is an inbuilt functionality in Laravel i.e. DNS validator. To apply that validator all you need to do is change email validation as follows:
'email' => 'email'
to
'email' => 'email:rfc,dns'
This way you can apply both DNS and RFC validator to your email address. For a DNS validator, click here.
Faker is a really helpful tool for testing but is the default email set by Faker valid? No, they are not. $faker->email provides valid email but only sometimes. But there is no need to panic, faker provides us with $faker->freeEmail which provides safe emails.
$faker->freeEmail the function generates an email from safe domains like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail. So, feel free to replace $faker->email it with $faker->freeEmail.
