Apostrophe in the Email Address?
Here is a question for my IT/Sysadmin readers out there. When you get a user who has an apostrophe, or an unusual character in their last name, how do you go about setting up his or her email address? Do you:
- Drop the apostrophe and special characters and/or replace them with the closest ASCII equivalent to keep it easy
- Keep the special characters and force everyone in the world to struggle as they try to email that user
Apparently IT people at a certain bank that I will not name (but let me just say it’s initials are HSBC) think that option #2 is a good idea. Why? Let’s think about a hypothetical scenario in which, for example and apostrophe in the email could be a problem. Again, this is just a make believe situation that has never actually happened yesterday at my company.
So, hypothetically speaking a made up user JC calls me up yesterday and tells me that she can’t send email to one Frogurt D’mangello who works at the said bank. Why can’t she do it? Because Mr. Frogurt’s email looks like this:
On the surface this is ok - after all apostrophes are allowed to be part of the email address according to the RFC, right? I know this, you know this but apparently whoever hacked together SquirrelMail didn’t. So when you try to send an email to Mr. Frogurt via this popular and widely used webmail application his address becomes:
Yes, someone is running mysql_escape_string method on all input fields, even those which legally are allowed to contain MySQL unfriendly characters. I should be mad at SquirrelMail but you know what - they are doing the right thing. I sanitize all my input fields too when I work on a web application. Better be safe than sorry. Naturally, they could use strip_slashes just before actually sending the email but what are you going to do. It’s a bug (which might have been already patched in then newest release), but I can’t fix it because I do not maintain the SquirelMails server. 
But the situation is now a conundrum because JC is behind some draconian firewall which blocks all outgoing ports save for port 80 meaning she can’t use Outlook to send emails. She also can’t use SquirrelMail due to this peculiar bug. So how do they communicate?
This could have been easily avoided if certain IT department simply had a policy which said “only dots and alphanumeric ASCII characters in usernames”. And not just because certain email packages may not support all the different addressing formats as specified in the RFC. It’s also because everyone thinks they know how to validate emails but they don’t. Half the validation scripts out there is just plain wrong. You actually need a 6.4K regular expression to cover all the different addressing schemes covered by the RFC. So if Mr. Frogurt wants to subscribe to some mailing list, or sign into some popular web application he might at one point be told his email is not valid. Remove the apostrophe, and even the most broken email validator will let it through.
Not to mention the hassle of emphasizing the apostrophe every time he tries to dictate his email address to someone over the phone. So really, other than blindly following the RFC, what other benefits are there of putting that non alphanumeric character in his email? Would Mr. Frogurt really mind if his email started with frogurt.dmangello? Would it really make his life a living hell, or would it actually spare him some potential hassles, misunderstandings and unnecessary tech support calls?
I too have a non-standar letter in my name. If I wanted, I could set up my email as: Łukasz@example.com. It would be legal under RFC but I would probably spend the rest of my days explaining to people what that “weird L” is and how to get it in Outlook. Oh, and no iPhone user would probably ever email me because these poor schmucks can’t copy and paste yet. ;P
I say stick to alphanumeric ASCII and dots. Anything more is just asking for trouble.
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March 20th, 2008 at 12:35 pm (8561) [Quote]
I have that issue, unfortunately. My last name starts with “O’L”…fun, eh. I am on a contract with the federal government, and the department set up an email address with the apostrophe! The problem is, some websites don’t accept that (when signing up for webcasts, newsletters, etc.) It’s a royal pain, and I would be fine if they left it as “OL”.
Posted usingMarch 20th, 2008 at 1:25 pm (8562) [Quote]
We had a problem like that. Salesforce.com (and later SugarCRM) doesn’t like email addresses with slashes in them. We had some clients on lotus notes which had lots of slashes in them. We ended up having to put the email addresses in the comments section. Stupid.
Posted usingMarch 20th, 2008 at 7:57 pm (8563) [Quote]
I didn’t know an apostrophe was even allowed in email addresses…
However, as a sysadmin, I (would) always omit them, and use basic a-z and 0-9 characters, underscores and periods only. Keeps things easier for all types of software/websites
Posted usingMarch 20th, 2008 at 10:42 pm (8564) [Quote]
Oh wow - see, two other real world examples of where this has been a problem. It’s more widespread tan I thought.
@Fred - yes, apostrophe is legal. So is %, $, #, +, \ and etc.. Weird, but true. See here.
Posted usingMarch 21st, 2008 at 5:03 am (8566) [Quote]
As a Sysadmin I always try to keep things simple. This means: only a-z, 0-9, “-”, “_” and “.” are allowed characters in email adresses.
Posted usingThis helps me to not run in any problems with uncommon filenames of the mailboxes, problems with scripts that are using email adresses or problems with different locales and charsets on different operating systems.
March 21st, 2008 at 6:53 pm (8570) [Quote]
At MSU that’s handled properly, but we still have a subdomain in the e-mail address (mail.domain.edu)…but there are good news, before this semester is over that should go as well so that we can finally have our lastnamefirstnitial @domain.edu
Posted usingMarch 24th, 2008 at 2:36 am (8574) [Quote]
gah!
If only I could link images here. I wouldn’t say anything normally, but the subject of the article is apostrophes, after all…
For me, I believe in manifesto of the Deny Any And All Punctuation That Is Not A Dot Or Horizontal And Thin In Email Addresses Party (the DAaAPTiNaDoHaTiEA Party), who basically agree with Fr3d up there. No way am I ever allowing an email address like naïf@vacri.mil as it just causes problems.
Posted usingMarch 24th, 2008 at 7:07 am (8578) [Quote]
Agreed-but then again if I had Apostrophe in my name it would bother me that I have to drop it for the email address. I would probably prefer to make everyone’s life easier and drop it but still it seems unfair.
Posted usingMarch 24th, 2008 at 10:54 am (8581) [Quote]
@Miloš - the subdomain doesn’t bother me that much - they just make the email longer and more unwieldy. However sometimes there are good reasons for them. For example rage, multinational companies use country specific sub domains to differentiate national branches (ie. @us.companyname.com, @jp.companyname.com and etc..).
In MSU’s case they just seem unnecessary. Glad to hear they will be going away
@vacri - fixd
Posted usingMarch 24th, 2008 at 4:41 pm (8584) [Quote]
In a perfect world the programmers of mail systems would all follow the syntax and rules in the RFCs and all email systems would interoperate. As you can see it is not a perfect world so don’t knock those of us who support systems that are RFC compliant.
Just wait till the 8-bit foreign language domains are in use. Then you will see who is compliant and who is not.
Posted usingMarch 24th, 2008 at 5:26 pm (8586) [Quote]
@Airmail - I’m not knocking you for supporting the RFC. I’m thrilled your mail system allows for this. I completely agree that everyone should shape up and start implementing email systems that are compliant with the RFC.
But we don’t live in a perfect world, and judging from the examples above having apostrophe in the email address does create issues at times.
I’m not happy about it either.
Posted usingApril 2nd, 2008 at 8:37 pm (8663) [Quote]
Yes, the 8-bit foreign language domains compliance is very handy to have when your end users lack the keyboard space for “squiggles”. I’m sure your RFC compliant MTA will be very handy when your boss gives you THAT 5am call because he cannot type out the email address for Mr.Miyagi and he needs to send that sucker right NOW! I am sure you can do the the correct x– translation in your sleep.
Posted using