README

A package to ensure that a Gmail address is unique.

The Gmail platform offers some features that other email platforms don't. There can be an infinite number of different Gmail addresses that point to a single Gmail inbox/account, which can make it very easy for malicious users to abuse with no effort.

To learn more about how a user can make a infinite addresses for one Gmail inbox, check out this article.

This package makes it possible to detect duplicate addresses for one Gmail account and to ensure they're unique.

Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require imliam/php-unique-gmail-address

Usage

The primary usage of this package revolves around the supplied UniqueGmailAddress class, which can be passed an email address to compare:

$email = new UniqueGmailAddress('example@gmail.com');

The isGmailAddress method will check if the given address belongs to a Gmail account:

$one = new UniqueGmailAddress('example@gmail.com');
$one->isGmailAddress(); // true

$two = new UniqueGmailAddress('example@googlemail.com');
$two->isGmailAddress(); // true

$three = new UniqueGmailAddress('example@example.com');
$three->isGmailAddress(); // false

The normalizeAddress method will take an email address and normalize it to the simplest variation:

$email = new UniqueGmailAddress('ex.am.ple+helloworld@googlemail.com');
$email->normalizeAddress(); // example@gmail.com

⚠️ It's best to save and use the email address exactly as the user gave instead of only saving a normalized version. If a user enters a denormalized email address, they probably expect any emails they receive to be at that exact address and not the normalized version.

The getRegex and getRegexWithDelimeters methods will return a regular expression that can be used to compare the original email address to another one, using a function like preg_match:

$email = new UniqueGmailAddress('example@gmail.com');
$email->getRegex(); // ^e(\.?)+x(\.?)+a(\.?)+m(\.?)+p(\.?)+l(\.?)+e(\+.*)?\@(gmail|googlemail).com$

The matches method will immediately match the regular expression against another value, returning true if both email addresses belong to the same Gmail account:

$email = new UniqueGmailAddress('example@gmail.com');
$email->matches('ex.am.ple+helloworld@googlemail.com'); // true

Laravel Rule

One of the most common use cases for wanting to check duplicate Gmail accounts is to prevent multiple users signing up to your service with the same email address.

To handle this case, the package also provides a Laravel validation rule class that can be used to check the database if a matching email address is already present.

$request->validate([
    'email' => [new UniqueGmailAddressRule()],
]);

By default, it will check the email column in the users table, but these can be overriden if needed when using the rule:

$request->validate([
    'email' => [new UniqueGmailAddressRule('contacts', 'email_address')],
]);

This rule assumes that you are storing denormalized email addresses in the database. This rule will use a regex match against every row in the database to check if

💡 If you don't want to use a regex match against every row of the database, you could instead store the normalized email address in a second column alongside the original email address, for example in a normalized_email column.

This would allow you use the regular exists rule to do a direct match against, much more efficiently.

Changelog

Please see CHANGELOG for more information on what has changed recently.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Security

If you discover any security related issues, please email liam@liamhammett.com instead of using the issue tracker.

Credits

• Liam Hammett
• All Contributors

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.