Are two periods allowed in the local-part of an email address?
- by Mike B
A third-party email gateway relay is refusing to process a message for an email address we're sending to. The address is in the format of [email protected] (note the two periods). Is this allowed by RFC guidelines?
RFC 2822 seems to object to this in section 3.4.1:
The locally interpreted string is either a quoted-string or a
dot-atom. If the string can be represented as a dot-atom (that is, it
contains no characters other than atext characters or "." surrounded
by atext characters), then the dot-atom form SHOULD be used and the
quoted-string form SHOULD NOT be used. Comments and folding white
space SHOULD NOT be used around the "@" in the addr-spec.
Furthermore, in that same section, it references this:
addr-spec = local-part "@" domain
local-part = dot-atom / quoted-string / obs-local-part
I interpret this to mean that the localpart can have content separated by dots but there cannot be two successive dots, and it cannot start or end with a dot. That being said, I'm not familiar with dot-atom syntax so maybe I'm mistaken here.
Can someone please confirm and explain?
