I am assuming there are other web developers in Exchange environments that might have some insight into a problem I'm having. It's standards-related, I promise.
We're a company that utilizes an Exchange server for mail and scheduling. We have lots of email addresses and lots of email distribution groups. Our Net Admins have established a naming convention for distribution groups that enforces a desired sort in Outlook. Here is a recent example: %<Company Code>-<Cross-Functional Team> (Distribution Group) My problem mostly revolves around this fairly new "cross-functional team" naming convention. You may have noticed the problem already. The group name starts with a percent sign. That means their email address starts with a percent sign. If everyone stayed completely within Outlook for email generation, that'd be just fine...Outlook doesn't care. But webpages with mailto links that fire up a mail client, even Outlook, *do*. And cross-functional teams in our company are small enough that they want to link to their email address in simple mailto links on their various webpages. The percent sign is an escape character. On its own, a mail client (even Outlook) looks two characters beyond the percent sign and tries to figure out what character you really meant. Since in my case, this is usually %ME it's outside of the conventions for escaped characters. Outlook interprets %ME as ?. I don't believe that using a percent sign in an email address is best form. But my opinion doesn't matter. I'll need to use standards published by recognized bodies of knowledge to make my case. The W3C helps a little, calling a percent sign a reserved character not for use in URIs. IANA establishes that mailtos are indeed URIs in RFC2368. This is helpful in establishing that mailto is a URI scheme, but this RFC also suggests escaping the escape (%25) to make a percent sign. IETF in its RFC3986 suggests the same thing but reads a little more ominous about using percents. Gah! Are there any other resources people are aware of that may help me make this argument using standards rationale? Jona ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************