sendmail and single quote as part of an address

[K.C. Chan]

I have someone sending email to my company which has single quote as part of an email address. We are able to recieve the email. But when the powers to be, try replying to the email, he gets a rejected message. Does any one know if sendmail has an issue with single quote character as part of an email address? If so, does any one know how to get this to work with sendmail? Thanks.

[Steven E. Protter]

Whoever thought a quote, single or double can be part of an email address was wrong.

This will blow up scripts, sendmail log processing, any number of things.

how is this script going to work:

mail -s "Morning status on system" myaddress'@yahoo.com

The mails never going to get out, I guarantee that.

SEP

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

I have not tried it myself (none of the people
I do sent mails to usually has a quote in their
address), but you might try to escape the quote
as in

name\'contin@host.top

Greetings, Martin

[labadie_1]

to test your mail syntax,you can send a mail to an echo server, which should reply to you.
An example of an echo mail server is
echo@cnam.fr

Of course, if you do not have a reply mail...

regards

Géra

[K.C. Chan]

Martin,
No luck. This did not work for me. I know it is a long shot. But any help on resolving this is appreciate. Thanks.

[K.C. Chan]

OK, apparently the powers to be can send email to this recipient with a single quote as part of the email address, e.g: JackO'Conner@somedomain.com. But he on the other hand can not reply back. I will ask for more specific error from the powers to be. Meanwhile does any one have any suggestions in resolving this issue? Thanks.

[Martin P.J. Zinser · Accepted solution]

Hello K.C.,

can you organize some actual error message for us (appropriatly changed to protect personal data).

SEP, I just checked RFC 821 which does specify the SMTP protocol and I do not see anything in there that would "outlaw" a quote character in the username part of a mail address.

Greetings, Martin

[K.C. Chan]

Hei Martin, Feeling like giving you a 10 for point out the RFC rules. After reading it, I check my firewall and sure enough that character was not included in the firewall rules for smtp as a valid character. I make the changes and commited it, then ask the powers to be to test it out tonight. I will let you know if it works, as soon as I find out about it.

[K.C. Chan]

just a follow to let all involved in this thread that it works.

[Steven E. Protter]

Nice to know about the RFC. Didn't know that. Now I do. itrc forums strike again.

I will reiterate that not everyone prepares their systems for email addresses that are off the beaten track.

There may be issues with mail servers (exchange) that don't care about following the rules. If you start getting bounces you might want to pick a different email address.

If you find eveyrthing sailes smoothly please post back. If you find issues, please document them, I find it pretty interesting.

Good Luck,

SEP