Peter's Gekko

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A . in the first part of an email address

An email address does contain at least one dot; Take Pete@Gekko-Software.nl Some organizations, like mine, also use dots in the first parts; like Pete.van.Ooijen@Gekko-Software.nl Imho this makes sense, the dots separate the parts of my full name. But a lot of sites, including FI parts of MSDN, do not accept such an address; it's considered ill-formatted. Not very user-friendly, especially when the messages returned are pretty vague.

Published Mar 22 2006, 04:28 AM by pvanooijen

Filed under: Chatter

Comments

Bil Simser said:

I think it's silly to assume that. The only valid email address is anypattern@anypattern. I mean william.paul.simser@mydomain.ab.ca is a perfectly valid email address (or at least should be).

# March 22, 2006 8:34 AM

Eber Irigoyen said:

in some cases they are accepted but are parsed wrong, gmail had that problem for a while, you would send an email to an address containing dots on the first part and someone else would get your email (if such address existed)

# March 22, 2006 11:21 AM

Steve Barron said:

In addition to ., I often have trouble with '.

My boss' last name is O'Connell so every app I write that has an email address gets an apostrophe in the test data before user testing. While my code always handles it, I'm amazed at how many services reject it - even within our own company who assigned that address to her!

# March 22, 2006 1:15 PM

pvanooijen said:

@(:)) Bill, you're aboslutely right, a domain name can contain multiple dots as well. But what is it I am I assuming ?

# March 22, 2006 1:48 PM

Derek said:

Steve,

Your boss should probably change his email address. His problems aren't likely to be limited to entering it on web forms - many server products treat the apostraphe as a reserved character. As far as I can tell, it should be allowed by RFC, but it's a dangerous character.

http://www.remote.org/jochen/mail/info/chars.html

# March 22, 2006 2:31 PM