When should an IllegalArgumentException be thrown?

The API doc for IllegalArgumentException:

Thrown to indicate that a method has been passed an illegal or inappropriate argument.

From looking at how it is used in the JDK libraries, I would say:

• It seems like a defensive measure to complain about obviously bad input before the input can get into the works and cause something to fail halfway through with a nonsensical error message.

• It's used for cases where it would be too annoying to throw a checked exception (although it makes an appearance in the java.lang.reflect code, where concern about ridiculous levels of checked-exception-throwing is not otherwise apparent).

I would use IllegalArgumentException to do last ditch defensive argument checking for common utilities (trying to stay consistent with the JDK usage). Or where the expectation is that a bad argument is a programmer error, similar to an NullPointerException. I wouldn't use it to implement validation in business code. I certainly wouldn't use it for the email example.

When talking about "bad input", you should consider where the input is coming from.

Is the input entered by a user or another external system you don't control, you should expect the input to be invalid, and always validate it. It's perfectly ok to throw a checked exception in this case. Your application should 'recover' from this exception by providing an error message to the user.

If the input originates from your own system, e.g. your database, or some other parts of your application, you should be able to rely on it to be valid (it should have been validated before it got there). In this case it's perfectly ok to throw an unchecked exception like an IllegalArgumentException, which should not be caught (in general you should never catch unchecked exceptions). It is a programmer's error that the invalid value got there in the first place ;) You need to fix it.

Throwing runtime exceptions "sparingly" isn't really a good policy -- Effective Java recommends that you use checked exceptions when the caller can reasonably be expected to recover. (Programmer error is a specific example: if a particular case indicates programmer error, then you should throw an unchecked exception; you want the programmer to have a stack trace of where the logic problem occurred, not to try to handle it yourself.)

If there's no hope of recovery, then feel free to use unchecked exceptions; there's no point in catching them, so that's perfectly fine.

It's not 100% clear from your example which case this example is in your code, though.