Are two periods allowed in the local-part of an email address?

Posted by Mike B on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Mike B
Published on 2012-06-05T15:23:33Z Indexed on 2012/06/05 16:42 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 172

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email

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smtp

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rfc

A third-party email gateway relay is refusing to process a message for an email address we're sending to. The address is in the format of [email protected] (note the two periods). Is this allowed by RFC guidelines?

RFC 2822 seems to object to this in section 3.4.1:

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.

Furthermore, in that same section, it references this:

addr-spec = local-part "@" domain

local-part = dot-atom / quoted-string / obs-local-part

I interpret this to mean that the localpart can have content separated by dots but there cannot be two successive dots, and it cannot start or end with a dot. That being said, I'm not familiar with dot-atom syntax so maybe I'm mistaken here.

Can someone please confirm and explain?

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