Invalid email addresses

[_Al]

G'day.

So I believe your email address validator doesn't accept a plus sign.

A little-known feature of gmail, which I have been employing extensively since I discovered it, is that you can put [e-mail] and it will go to [e-mail] - but gmail will keep the +any_string so you can filter/label/ignore any email that comes in to a particular address.

Very useful but I can't have a +pistonheads one!

Letting you know
Al

[RacingPete]

An interesting feature of gmail

There is a little disagreement whether what gmail have allowed to be employed is valid, the differences between RFC2821 (SMTP) and RFC2822 (Mail Message Format) are somewhat in contradiction. RFC2821 is a bit stricter, and says (and I am quoting)

RFC2821 said:

Systems MUST NOT define mailboxes in such a way as to require the use in SMTP of non-ASCII characters (octets with the high order bit set to one) or ASCII "control characters" (decimal value 0-31 and 127).
These characters MUST NOT be used in MAIL or RCPT commands or other commands that require mailbox names.

We employ software to check email and bounce email addresses and I would have to run it pass those systems to see if we wont be rejecting proper email addresses before changing the validation checks.

[marshalla]

But a "+" is ASCII 2b (decimal 43) surely ?

Not in the control range and not outside the 7-bit range either.

[RacingPete]

Agreed, not sure where I read the paper about the use of + by Google, it also complained about _ usage in email addresses too, so was probably some internet perfectionist moaning. As I said we will look into the validation checkers.

[Scraggles]

got a gmail account, some slitty eyed is sending mail to a variant of the username, I cant log into that account even though gmail tell me I should be able...

it goes into spam to never re-emerge