in reply to checking email syntax

If you really want to set up your own regex to validate email addresses, grab a copy of Mastering Regular Expressions, which has the appropriate regex on the last page (prior to the index). It's only 6,598 characters long...

If you don't want to have to deal with that, then there's always CPAN. Also keep in mind that a syntactically-correct email address is not necessarily a valid email address.