How to validate email addresses in Access?

Question

I need to validate an email field in a table in Access 2010. I tried:

Is Null OR ((Like "*?@?*.?*") AND
  (Not Like "*[ ,;]*"))

but this did not work.

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Please explain what you mean by "did not work". I just tried that validation rule (which appears to have come from [here](http://allenbrowne.com/ValidationRule.html)) and it worked for the most common cases. It's not bullet-proof, but I'm sure that it is sufficient for lots of applications. — Gord Thompson, May 29 '13 at 19:15

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 04 '13 at 10:51

It appears that your database is in ANSI 92 mode, and when you pasted in the rule...

Is Null OR ((Like "*?@?*.?*") AND (Not Like "*[ ,;]*"))

...Access automatically changed Like to ALike, producing...

Is Null Or ((ALike "*?@?*.?*") And (Not ALike "*[ ,;]*"))

The problem is that ALike uses the ANSI wildcard characters, so you need to change the rule to

Is Null Or ((ALike "%_@_%._%") And (Not ALike "%[ ,;]%"))

1 Answers1