/* Used to check if an email is valid (or acceptable for my purposes */ The goal of this code is to ensure $email is structured as follows: 1) MAILBOX NAME (min 3 characters) (alphanumeric|alphanumeric, underscore, period or hyphen|alphanumeric) 2) @ Symbol 3) DOMAIN (min 3 characters) (alphanumeric|alphanumeric or hyphen|alphanumeric) 4) EXTENSION (.com|.net|.org) if ( preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z0-9]+[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+[a-zA-Z0-9]+@+[a-zA-Z0-9]+[a-zA-Z0-9-]+[a-zA-Z0-9]+\.(com|net|org)$/", $email ) > 0 ) { echo "Good"; } else { echo "Bad"; }