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Occasionally, I will come across a post (either a question or an answer) where, at the end of their code, something like this will be there:

If you have any more questions, you can contact me at [email protected].

I believe there should be a pop-up and a block preventing the user from posting that question when an email is detect somewhere in the post.

Having emails in posts is bad because it encourages other users to continue a discussion outside of SE, which can lead to unconnected information (for example, a tip in an answer that is a response to something said in an email), and it prevents future users from seeing all the information that the OP has to offer.

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    Is that really such a big problem that it warrants a feature? Commented Jul 31, 2015 at 0:07
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    @JeroenVannevel It's not that big of a problem, but it's not that complicated of a solution either. Commented Jul 31, 2015 at 0:08
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    Can you guarantee that there is no programming language in the world that would have valid syntax that would trip an email-matching regex? Granted, that is perhaps unlikely, but... can you further guarantee that any code with an example/placeholder email (e.g. [email protected]) isn't worth posting? This isn't as uncomplicated as you may think. Commented Jul 31, 2015 at 0:20
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    I think one of the bots in the Tavern complains if there's a post anywhere on the network with an email in it. Commented Jul 31, 2015 at 3:15
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    @Shokhet Not quite; it excludes several sites from this check, and also ignores emails appearing in code blocks (and emails with @example...). There are still some false positives: people discussing, e.g., customer databases, talk about storing and retrieving emails quite a bit. Commented Jul 31, 2015 at 5:12
  • @NormalHuman Thanks for clarifying that Commented Jul 31, 2015 at 12:08

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I agree e-mail addresses should not be posted. However, such a filter would undoubtedly hit a lot of innocent posts as well.

I do not dare to guess how many posts there are on SO alone about matching e-mail addresses. Communicating about such questions and answers is going to get tough if you forbid placing e-mail addresses altogether, even the obviously fake ones.

Another problem is it won't be able to detect account[at]domain[dot]tld and all other imaginable variants. Checking whether an e-mail address is valid is hard. Checking whether any part of a post is a valid, non-bogus e-mail address even harder.

We could do a warning (but who reads those nowadays?), but a block would definitely create more problems than it would solve.

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    There are also legitimate reasons for writing emails in posts, e.g. security.stackexchange.com/a/45044 Commented Jul 31, 2015 at 3:21
  • There are also LBRY URLs, e.g. https://odysee.com/@eevblog:7 (though they seem to be covered (no false positives)). Commented Apr 21, 2022 at 9:10

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