As others have mentioned, adding a single rule to your checks is unlikely to be an effective way of stopping spam - you may want to consider captchas, established software to prevent spam, and so on, instead of trying to roll your own.

Having said, that, regexes are also not really a good way to parse email addresses, which is why I would use Email::Address; you may also be interested in Email::Valid (which isn't perfect either, but still better than hand-rolled checks).

use warnings;
use strict;

use Email::Address;
sub countdots {
    my @addrs = Email::Address->parse(shift);
    die "expected exactly one address" unless @addrs==1;
    my $x = (my $tmp = $addrs[0]->user) =~ tr/././;
    my $y = ($tmp = $addrs[0]->host) =~ tr/././;
    return wantarray ? ($x,$y) : $x+$y;
}

use Test::More;
my @tests = (
    ['test@gmail.com', 0, 1],
    ['test.test@gmail.com', 1, 1],
    ['test.test.test@gmail.com', 2, 1],
    ['test.test.test.test@gmail.com', 3, 1],
    ['test.test.test.test.test@gmail.com', 4, 1],
    ['test@foo.bar.com', 0, 2],
    ['test.test@foo.bar.com', 1, 2],
);
plan tests => 2*@tests+1;

for my $t (@tests) {
    my ($ad, $exp_x, $exp_y) = @$t;
    my ($got_x, $got_y) = countdots($ad);
    is $got_x, $exp_x;
    is $got_y, $exp_y;
}
is countdots($tests[0][0]), $tests[0][1]+$tests[0][2];

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In reply to Re: Stopping excessive periods in email by haukex
in thread Stopping excessive periods in email by htmanning

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