> ...it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet
There's something that doesn't sit right with me about this statement, and I'm not sure what it is. Are you sure you didn't just join for the money? (edit: cool problems, too)
The AI train is going with or without you, if you can be part of it and improve the situaton, why not.
In 99% of the projects I worked on my professional life, anything that is coming from an human input is manipulated as a string and most of the time, it stays like this in all of the application layers (with more or less checks in the path).
On your precise exemple, I can even say that I never saw something like an "Email object".
For examples many website reject + character, which is totally valid and gmail uses that for temporary emails.
Same for adresses.