Поведение изменилось где-то в апреле.См. ошибка # 49576 и ревизия 297350 .
Эта электронная почта действительно недействительна, или, по крайней мере, это понимали разработчики PHP.Источник несет это уведомление:
/*
* The regex below is based on a regex by Michael Rushton.
* However, it is not identical. I changed it to only consider routeable
* addresses as valid. Michael's regex considers a@b a valid address
* which conflicts with section 2.3.5 of RFC 5321 which states that:
*
* Only resolvable, fully-qualified domain names (FQDNs) are permitted
* when domain names are used in SMTP. In other words, names that can
* be resolved to MX RRs or address (i.e., A or AAAA) RRs (as discussed
* in Section 5) are permitted, as are CNAME RRs whose targets can be
* resolved, in turn, to MX or address RRs. Local nicknames or
* unqualified names MUST NOT be used.
В changelog упоминается это исправление ошибки для PHP 5.3.3 и PHP 5.2.14.