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
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