> Thanks for the information. I read through the RFC, although I found
> it a little challenging to follow (for those of us not used to
> thinking in terms of tokens and atoms). I have a couple of quick
> questions:
RFC822 wasn't meant for a lay person to read. <G> I've dealt with that one for
years, and I still pick up new things in it.
> Second, after reading the RFC, it is not clear to me whether the
> quote/escape character (\) is needed inside a quoted string. That
> is, in the line
> To: "Ben (Mail Guy)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> do the parenthesis really need to be preceded by \, since they're
> already inside a quoted string?
"Quoted" (sorry for the quotes!) means two things as far as RFC822 goes. There's a
"quoted-string" (as in, "this is a quoted string"), and there are quoted characters
(for example, "there is a quoted (\") character in this string).
To answer the question, quoted characters are only needed in a quoted string for a
carriage return, a backslash, or a quote. They are *allowed* for other characters,
but not required.
In the case of:
To: "Ben (Mail Guy)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
the quotation marks can NOT be quoted (you can't have \"), because the name of the
user is considered by RFC822 to be a word, and a word can not use character quoting.
So it would actually be a violation of RFC822 to have:
To: \"Ben (Mail Guy)\" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Third, the most common problem I've seen is a comma inside the quoted
> string, such as To: "Bednarz, Ben" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Should this be preceded by a backslash?
There is no need to have a backslash in there (although it is legal to have one, it is
not required).
--
-Scott
Declude: Anti-virus and Anti-spam solutions for IMail. http://www.declude.com
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