• Email addresses with a preceding name string

    From Eli the Bearded@21:1/5 to Jean F. Martinelle on Fri Jan 18 20:17:50 2019
    XPost: comp.os.linux.misc

    Crosspost to comp.mail.misc added.

    In comp.os.linux.misc, Jean F. Martinelle <JFMart@overthere.com> wrote:
    Sometimes I get emails in which the To field has the following
    format:

    "Some Name" abc@noaddress.xyz

    Doubtful, as that is not an RFC compliant format.

    The standards allow a lot of variation, but there are three preferred
    versions:

    From: Name String <address@hostname>
    From: address@hostname (Name String)
    From: address@hostname

    Name String is allowed to be empty for some ok derivatives of that:

    From: <address@hostname>
    From: address@hostname ()

    If Name String has certain email sensitive characters, most particularly
    a period, then it needs to be quoted for the first format:

    From: "Name M.I. String" <address@hostname>

    For the plain case I started with, quotes are optional.

    Some exotic forms allowed but discouraged:

    From: (Name String) <address@hostname>
    From: (Name) address@hostname (String)
    From: address(Name String)@hostname
    From: address@hostname (Name (Abritrary (Balanced) Parens) String)

    What do I have to do so that, when I send emails, they are
    received in a format like the one above - i.e. with the email address of
    the recipient preceded by a string? Is this something that some email
    clients can do, while others cannot?

    Email clients tend to pick one form and use that. Many email clients
    also will not show you the raw header, but will instead show you the interpreted one, eg leaving out quotes around "Name M.I. String".

    So what you get might not be what you send....

    AND you didn't mention your software.

    I tend to use Rnmail to send email, and have hacked my mail software
    to use Rnmail to compose and send email instead of using the built-in
    composer. My mail software prefers the "address@hostname (Name String)"
    format natively, but with Rnmail I can specify a default of any sort
    I like and edit it on a per-message basis. This is important to me since
    I tend to use A LOT of email addresses, and sometimes edit the name
    part to match.

    Elijah
    ------
    https://github.com/eli-the-bearded/eli-mailx

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  • From Grant Taylor@21:1/5 to Eli the Bearded on Fri Jan 18 18:13:40 2019
    XPost: comp.os.linux.misc

    On 1/18/19 1:17 PM, Eli the Bearded wrote:
    If Name String has certain email sensitive characters, most particularly
    a period, then it needs to be quoted for the first format:

    From: "Name M.I. String" <address@hostname>

    I've seen plenty of cases where the From: header has something like this
    in it:

    From: "John Doe <john@doe.com>" <75567817-7b99-4e6f-ab4b-89e16e7d59c6 @gmail.com>

    So, for the people that don't know better, or the MUAs that don't behave better, they see the following (or something close to it):

    From: John Doe <john@doe.com>

    Thus leading them to think that it is the unquoted named string that you mentioned.



    --
    Grant. . . .
    unix || die

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