Ampersand in email address causing problems

[pcwilson]

Hi Guys

My mailserver (Exchange 5.5) is rejecting all mail from a particular customer. The NDR she gets states "Invalid email address format (in reply to MAIL FROM command)". Her email address contains an ampersand e.g. joe&[e-mail]. I suspect this is the problem.

Is there anyway to tell Exchange that the ampersand is valid?

Cheers
Phil

[pdV6]

Try [e-mail] as an experiment

[JamieBeeston]

I think you will find most mailservers reject special chars, just convince her to change to _ i think even + might give you issues in this day and age of Security.

Not a fix as much as a resolution

J

[iaint]

According to the RFC & is a valid character in the local portion of the address.

[_dobbo_]

JamieBeeston said:

I think you will find most mailservers reject special chars, just convince her to change to _ i think even + might give you issues in this day and age of Security. Not a fix as much as a resolution J

Being an email geek by trade I've just spent 5 minutes reading the relevant portion of RFC822 trying to work out if an ampersand is a special or control character, which I don't think it is.

This means the ampersand should be allowed, but of course Microsoft and RFC compliance have never been good bedfellows...



edit... beaten by 2 minutes...





>> Edited by _dobbo_ on Thursday 25th May 14:31

[iaint]

Tonsko said:

iaint said: According to the RFC & is a valid character in the local portion of the address. Since when have MS ever listened to an RFC? They didn't even get the TCP/IP stack implemetation right! >> Edited by Tonsko on Thursday 25th May 14:50

That's certainly true. I suspect their emaila ddress compliance was lifted from a bit of JavaScript on some 12 year old's webshite somewhere...

[pcwilson]

Finally got to the bottom of this. Turns out that Exchange Server wasn't the problem, it was the anti-virus software on the mail server that was objecting to the ampersand. I feel really guilty now for jumping to the conclusion that M$ was to blame. NOT.

[pdV6]

Didn't Jamie imply that might be the case back at the start of the thread?

[pcwilson]

pdV6 said:

Didn't Jamie imply that might be the case back at the start of the thread?

Hi pdV6. I've re-read the thread and I can't see what you're referring to, but then I could just be having a senior moment. They're getting more frequent.