Any way of seperating this from being required? I only want to validate if something is a valid email address if its entered, i’d add ‘valid_email|required” if I wanted to require it

From library.php

So an empty string would fail this.  I guess you could either hack the code, or create your own valid_email private function that allows “” to be entered.

Sweet, might just do a custom validation function in the controller and modify the regex there

but how can i validate if “anyname@anydomain” is real.
how can i validate the “anyname” and “anydomain”.

Short answer… you can’t.

Longer answer, there are various whois lookups you can do for the domain, but this reaches pointlessness pretty quickly.

Their fault if they dont get their own email address right.

I just posted a bit about how I handle emails in another thread, using PHPMailer, any messages that get undeliverable errors result in me de-activating their account.