On Monday, August 25, 2003, at 11:41 , David W. Tamkin wrote:
I'm not sure in which RFC (or where else) to look this up. To my
understanding, a period is allowed in the middle of the local part of
an
email address but it must be between two characters that are letters
of the
alphabet or digits; it may not be the first character of the local
part, nor
the last one before the at-sign, nor next to another period or any
other
punctuation mark. Is that correct?
From RFC 2822
3.4.1. Addr-spec specification
An addr-spec is a specific Internet identifier that contains a
locally interpreted string followed by the at-sign character ("@",
ASCII value 64) followed by an Internet domain. 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.
addr-spec = local-part "@" domain
local-part = dot-atom / quoted-string / obs-local-part
and
atext = ALPHA / DIGIT / ; Any character except controls,
"!" / "#" / ; SP, and specials.
"$" / "%" / ; Used for atoms
"&" / "'" /
"*" / "+" /
"-" / "/" /
"=" / "?" /
"^" / "_" /
"`" / "{" /
"|" / "}" /
"~"
atom = [CFWS] 1*atext [CFWS]
dot-atom = [CFWS] dot-atom-text [CFWS]
dot-atom-text = 1*atext *("." 1*atext)
so, a dot-atom is defined as a dot-atom-text enclosed in CFWS (Comment
or Foldable White Space) and dot-atom-text is defined as at least one
atext at the beginning and end. As I read this
"$bob.charles!" LEGAL
.bob NOT LEGAL
bob. NOT LEGAL
bob! LEGAL
bob^3 LEGAL
please note that some clueless sysadmins will insist that the first
character cannot be a numeric. They are 100% wrong.
--
There's nothing to do, so you just stay in bed [ah, poor thing] Why
live in the world when you can live in your head?
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