Well, first of all, your benchmark is extremely limited. It's only testing 4 simple strings. No long addresses, no comments (let alone nested comments), no routing addresses, no ip-addresses, no special characters. The least you could do is actually benchmark against the examples mentioned in RFC822.

Second, there's another module for email validation, one that uses Parse::RecDescent instead of regular expressions. It's called RFC::RFC822::Address.

Abigail