When we’re looking at the technical details of email addresses there are two quite different contexts we talk about. One is an “821 address” or “5321 address”. This is the email address as it’s used by the SMTP protocol, as part of the “MAIL FROM: <>” or “RCPT TO: <>” commands sent to the mailserver. It’s defined in RFC 821...
Most of the time when we’re talking about email addresses, we’re talking about the actual user@domain format that’s used to send mail over the wire, but that’s not how we most often see them. When they’re used in a To: or From: header they’re usually associated with a display name – the “real name” of the user with the associated email address...
Compared with some of the more complex pieces of the email protocol the From: header seems deceptively simple. But I’ve heard several people be confused about what it’s made up of over the past couple of months, so I thought I’d dig a bit deeper into how it’s defined and how it’s used in practice. Here’s a simple example: There are two interesting...
A story from someone handling support at a UK company that regularly sends out transactional email with no-reply@company in the From: line. [A] guy emailed in and started off the RMA process on a motherboard that was dead. A month later this guy rings up the store and starts yelling and cursing saying his motherboard has not arrived and that Nor Eply (the guy who he had apparently been...
Deliverability.com has a blog post from Naeem Kayani at Adknowledge about the recent Yahoo changes. They point to the reputation of the From: address as a factor. I’m not sure anyone knows what exactly Yahoo is doing, but the suggestions from Naeem are good ones.
Some marketers, even large marketing companies, send mail from email addresses that are unread. Justin Premick posted a list of reasons this is a very, very bad idea. Be sure to read the comments, too.
Given we deal with email addresses every day, dozens or thousands or millions of them, it seems a bit strange to ask what an email address is – but given some of the problems people have with the grubbier corners of address syntax it’s actually an interesting question. There are two real standards that define what is a valid email address and what isn’t. The most complex is RFC...
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