apostophe in an email

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addoc

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I have 2 email adresses. One personal, for here and I have a work one with my name as part of the email.

eg o'connor.

I have a numerous problems registering this email ..."not a vaild email address" on website around the world.

What is the reason for this?

But what i find amazing is, I get this error on irish websites incl a financial institution last week and my own bband suppiler(i had to ring to get the a subscritption).

There must a few websites out there reducing there potential market by 000's because they cant accept an o'connor, o'donnell etc?? especially in ireland.
 
daviddoran

daviddoran

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If you mean that your email is something like o'connor.john@example.com and it is getting refused then this is what I would have assumed. In technology " and ' are almost always reserved for quoting, not for names. Also, I think the original RFC for email address allows only a-z, A-Z, _, -, 0-9 and that is about it.
 
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addoc

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thanks for the tech explanation, but by now shouldnt websites, especially in ireland have that sorted. I mean if a company has a website and they want people to register whether its to buy, join to send them email etc, they have cut out a large portion of the market. I have reported this to 2 websites and they still have not fixed it. It's probaly more complicated than a 'fix' probably down to version of sw etc. But if i was in the irish market promoting a website(which i hope to do someday) and o'connors etc couldnt register id dump the whole thing and start again, straight away.................why would companies be slow to 'fix'. And if there mis a degree of complexity and cost, wouldnt it still have to be done...out of interest
 
daviddoran

daviddoran

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Unfortunately it isn't really a matter of being "sorted".
I was reading the original Email Specfication and it does indeed only allow for the characters I listed above. Therefore, unless a new standard was released then programmers of mail programs, mailboxes and websites etc. must adhere to the standard.

The problem is that if my website allowed you to sign up for an email like johno'connor@mysite.com there is a good chance that it wouldn't receive mail because other websites and email programs would reject the apostrophe in the address and so this is why the standard must be kept consistent.

Unfortunately this is an example of technology over usability. To the lay person it would be obvious that o'connor or óbrien could be an address but unfortunately there are technology restrictions alot of the time.
 
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Gavin

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Ugh I have a friend who has the exact same format in his email address and for the most part its a complete nightmare trying to email him.

If I was you I would create a new email address. Not really fair because it is your name but isn't worth losing contact with people.
 
kae

kae

New Member
the RFC you're thinking of is 822. According to that, just about any character is legal, as long as it is escaped or quoted.

Unfortunately, this makes it difficult for the average program to work with, so most programs only allow a subset of characters, for simplicity's sake. An example is that the apostrophe (') is usually used in programming as a delimiter (something which marks the beginning or end of a piece of data), so it can end up confusing the program.

The characters most software will allow are a-z, 0-9, '-', '_', and '.'. Other characters are legal according to the spec, but you will probably have trouble with them in real life.

the spec: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0822.txt

If you want an example of why most programmers will not allow every valid email address, have a look at the regexp expression here: http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html - takes up the bottom half of the page. The original is over 6000 characters long - probably longer than the rest of whatever application requires the email address.
 
mneylon

mneylon

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Staff member
Basically whoever setup your email in the first place wasn't very clever. They shouldn't have allowed an apostrophe to be used, as it's not a valid character for an email address. The only sane solution is to get an email address without the apostrophe - if that upsets you think of anyone with an accent in their name :)
 
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addoc

New Member
just realized something.. This is a ridiculous point im making. You wouldnt put the apostrophe in the email address in the first place. If ur name is o'connell you'd have doodoo_oconnell. my work email has me surname apostphied but i didnt create it ... i see now. all o's in ireland arent exluded:eek:
 
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