I can't read the regexp well enough to know what to toss, though.

Oh I didn't even look at it properly, I see the problem. It's designed to include optional non-email text.

Easy peasy:

[a-z ]

at the start is "a sequence of letters or spaces" so it should be enough just to put in

[a-z.' -]

which I just tested, and matches

P-M.M' Marcontell

which contains all the possible punctuation in people's names, I think.

(There's the underscore....)

Who has an underscore in their name?

But yeah, if that's an issue, put that in between the brackets as well. Does anyone have a number in their name?

If they do, then maybe we want

[\\w .'-]

which will match that well-known Buffista

p.m-m'm_ m4rc0nt3ll

because the \\w includes all letters, numbers and the underscore.

Who has an underscore in their name?

Jenny_G comes to mind.

I mean, really, there's no limit to the punctuation, isn't there? Didn't a /mieskie register (and get booted, but, yeah, well)? Someone could register with an asterisk. Maybe someone has.

Spawn1, DCM1101 (Paul's user name), and a couple others I think use numbers. Anyone with ~? I know they were popular before WX let you lc your name without them.

Also, FUCKERS!!!!!

We seem to have a lot of characters in usernames that I wouldn't have expected.

It it's really that complicated, I think the concept of email address needs to be redefined to be "the bits wrapped around the @", and put the username somewhere else.

Not that you can't write a regular expression to say "anything at all goes here" but then you have to start working from the other end, "anything at all except for the @ symbol", etc.

Ooo! Did I mention we have people with @ in their names?

Did I mention we have people with @ in their names?

t starts weeping quietly

Did I mention we have people with @ in their names?

One user. I'm sure we could ask him to change it.