Talk:Email address

Local-part quoted & comments

Hi everyone!

So either I misunderstood something in the article or there should be a clarification. The thing I'm less sure about is that just enquoting the local-part of my email address did not work and GMX (German Mail Exchange, my provider), gave back an Syntax Error when trying to send via Evolution.

The other thing is the comment part. I've tried to add a comment and it sended just fine, however than GMX came back with an email saying that there was a problem delivering that message, because the mail address doesn't exist.

I'm not sure though if I'm wrong and these paragraphs referred to how it should be handled instead of how it is handled.

EDIT: I've tested it with comments in the domain part and these work as expected and I got my email just fine.

0yqc (talk) 12:57, 29 August 2025 (UTC)

The relevant text from RFC 5322 is

dot-atom-text = 1*atext *("." 1*atext)
dot-atom = [CFWS] dot-atom-text [CFWS]
address = mailbox / group
mailbox = name-addr / addr-spec
name-addr = [display-name] angle-addr
angle-addr = [CFWS] "<" addr-spec ">" [CFWS] /
mailbox-list = (mailbox *("," mailbox)) / obs-mbox-list
address-list = (address *("," address)) / obs-addr-list
addr-spec = local-part "@" domain
local-part = dot-atom / quoted-string / obs-local-part
domain = dot-atom / domain-literal / obs-domain
domain-literal = [CFWS] "[" *([FWS] dtext) [FWS] "]" [CFWS]

However, a mail server is free to reject anything for policy reasons. It's bad form to reject syntax that's been valid for so long, but technically it doesn't violate any RFC. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 15:07, 29 August 2025 (UTC)

Ok, yeah. That was the part I was unsure about. If this reflects the truth or some definition that should be done by all services. Do I need to do anything to close this or similar now? I'm still kinda new to Wikipedia editing. 0yqc (talk) 15:09, 29 August 2025 (UTC)

There are procedures for closing certain type of formal discussions, but the closest wiki has to closing a generic discussion is archiving it, which is driven by inactivty.

If you have a mail server that is rejecting common forms of addresses, you might send a polite request to their postmaster, but there's no guaranty that he will act or even read it. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 15:27, 29 August 2025 (UTC)

White space in local part?

How much should the article say about folding white space in local parts? RFC 5322 has

   FWS             =   ([*WSP CRLF] 1*WSP) /  obs-FWS
   CFWS            =   (1*([FWS] comment) [FWS]) / FWS
   dot-atom-text   =   1*atext *("." 1*atext)
   dot-atom        =   [CFWS] dot-atom-text [CFWS]
   addr-spec       =   local-part "@" domain
   local-part      =   dot-atom / quoted-string / obs-local-part

My first take is that there should be examples with spaces but that CRLF would be TMI. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 14:44, 29 August 2025 (UTC)