Re: apostrophe in usernames?

[Tom Samplonius <tom@sdf.com>]

On Tue, 12 Nov 1996, James MacKinnon wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Does anyone know the current RFC status of special tokens with
> regard to apostrophes appearing in the username part of an email
> address(within the <>), i.e. the following error shows the difficulty:
> 
> <<- MAIL From:<Bonnie.O'Dwyer@UAlberta.CA> BODY=8BITMIME SIZE=2375
> ->> 501 Syntax error in parameters or arguments (this is abnormal, investigate!)
> 
> RFC822 does not list " ' " as a special, and I cannot find any (grep ) 
> reference in the rfc's for apostrophe at all (a double quote mark is
> a token, but it seems there is no discussion of a single quote).
> 
> This is under ZMailer version 2.99.10mea.
> 
> Out of curiosity, do more recent ZMail's handle this gracefully, or is 
> this indeed a true syntax error that does require this error handling?
> I would rather the source MTA leave out the apostrophe, but without
> cannon-fire, I might not be able to convince them.

  First of all, you are looking at the wrong RFC.  RFC-821 is the one you
want.

  "'" is not a "special" in RFC-821.

  It is generally useful to mention what mailer and version gave the above
error.  As I recall, the "this is abnormal, investigate" normally
translates to "help, my sysadmin has broken me".

  I don't know how more graceful Zmailer (btw, Zmail is something
completely different) could handle this.  There are so many broken mailers
out there right now: some by bad configuration, some by bad design (one NT
mailer that doesnt' accept "MAIL FROM:<>" comes to mind).

Tom