Deny an email address with plus sign

Hi @word1press,

Hope you are doing well.

I can reproduce the behavior on my site too. It’s not just *+* it’s also other special characters such as *%* , *&*, *#* , *(* ETC.

Notice when you save the Denylist rule, the list item *+* becomes ** , here is a screenshot https://i.imgur.com/6d6NSXc.jpg and that’s the reason why the WPForm Email Field is rejecting all the email address no matter if it contains a + sign or not.

So, I believe it’s a limitation of using special characters with Wildcards in WPForms as it may cause issues with the WPForm form core code. By the way, I also tested *-* and it worked perfectly. So there are some special characters that are not allowed and one of them being the +.

I hope this helps

CC: @jadealombro this guide should be updated with the information I provided above.

Take Care ??

• This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by IndiCartel.

Hey @word1press

I can recommend using the code snippet below to check for the + sign in the email address:

// Block submissions from email addresses that contain + symbol
function wpf_blacklist_emails( $field_id, $field_submit, $form_data ) {
    //
    if( strpos($field_submit, "+") !== FALSE ) { 
        wpforms()->process->errors[ $form_data['id'] ][ $field_id ] = esc_html__( 'We apologize for any inconvenience, we are unable to accept submissions using your email address.', 'wpforms' );
        return;
    }
}
add_action('wpforms_process_validate_email', 'wpf_blacklist_emails', 10, 3 );

In case it helps, here’s our tutorial with the most common ways to add custom code like this.

For the most beginner-friendly option in that tutorial, I’d recommend using the Code Snippets plugin.

@rizwan681 Thank you for your feedback, I will pass this on to the internal team. The following list of symbols have special meaning and might result in unexpected behavior:
[ \ ^ $ . | ? * + ( )

Thanks! ??