"Some of the recipients for the message are not valid"

[Karl Becker]

When I try to send an email from Windows Live Mail, I sometimes get the
error message

"The message could not be sent." "Some of the recipients for this message
are not valid"

or in German

"Die Nachricht konnte nicht gesendet werden." "Einige Empfänger dieser
Nachricht sind ungültig"

However the address looks 100% correct.

I suppose it's not exactly a mail issue, but an issue with the address book.
I synchronize between Outlook, Messenger and Windows Live Mail, and I
suppose somehow an invisible formatting error is introduced into the email
field.

The workaround is to log off from Live (click on the upper right corner of
the main window: "Log off from Windows Live Mail") and reenter the address
manually. When I'm logged on, the address is always auto-completed, and on
the screen it looks like the manually entered one, but the autocompleted
address produces the error, while the manually entered address does not.

The strange thing is: Even in the contacts folder, the address looks 100%
correct. The only thing I can imagine is, that somehow
'john doe (jo...@doe.example)' is considered to be the email address rather
than 'john doe' being the real name and only 'jo...@doe.example' being the
email. This would explain why it looks identical on the screen, but in fact
is very edifferent. It would also explain that the message pops up
immediately because this would be a very obvious syntax error in the email
format, which can be detedted without contacting the server.

My OS is Windows 7

Does anyone have the same issue or even a solution?

[Ildhund]

"Karl Becker" wrote in message news:jfoi9r$es9$1...@speranza.aioe.org...

I saw a related case last week. An email address (admittedly a complicated one with three periods ('.') in it after the '@' sign) was not accepted in Hotmail. It looked right everywhere, but when I copied it from a web page into Notepad, I could see that there were zero-width (control?) characters at ten-letter intervals. What appeared everywhere - including in the markup of the web page I copied it from - as johnf...@fishoutofwater.wanadoo.co.uk looked like this in Notepad: johnfisher?@fishoutofw?ater.wanado?o.co.uk This had probably occurred during some export/import or copy/paste exercise. Deleting the address from the contacts list and re-entering it by hand cured the problem.

That being said, some mail servers return an error interpreted by WLMail as 'invalid recipient' when in fact the problem is something else, like too many recipients or even an over-enthusiastic spam filter. The best way to find out is to conduct a web search for the server error message and the mail server concerned. Someone else will probably have had the same problem and - if you're lucky - solved it.
--
Noel

[...winston]

Hello Karl,
I've seen similar occur for pop3 accounts (autocomplete selection fails with 'recipient not valid') without a Live ID signon to
Windows Live services in Windows Live Mail (WLM) but never for Hotmail type accounts (Hotmail, Live, Msn.com) when using the Http
protocol for those accounts in combination with a Live ID signon (contacts synchronized with contacts.live.com) to Live services in
WLM.

--
...winston
msft mvp mail

"Karl Becker" wrote in message news:jfoi9r$es9$1...@speranza.aioe.org...

[Karl Becker]

Thank you for all your hints.


The issue just reappeared. The "To"-Field shows
_lname fname (user...@domain.example)_;
(If your Mail reader shows "_" charachters: They don't appear literally, but
I used them to mark beginning and ending of underline)
I copied and pasted the address to notepad, where it showed up as
lname fname<user...@domain.example>
(no " " between "fname" and "<")
Then I manually inserted
fname lname <user...@domain.example>
into the address line, but when I hit "send", it reverted back to
_lname fname (user...@domain.example)_;
In Outlook, from where I sync via the Cloud into Live Mail, the email field
is simply
user...@domain.example
and the "Display as" field is
fname lname (user...@domain.example)
(mind: "fname lname", while it appears is "lname fname" in Windows Live
Mail)
That's also the way it appears in the Web based mail.live.com.

Then I did the known workaround:
- save the unsent mail
- klick the Avatar in the upper right corner of Windows Live Mails main
window to log out of the cloud
- enter fname lname <user...@domain.example> in the "To" address field (no
auto completion happens)
- hit "send"
- done.

I noticed, in the short time after hitting send and before the window
closed, the Address changed to
_fname lname_;
Therefore I suppose, what you see on the screen is the display name and the
email address is internally appended to the display name, resulting in
fname lname <user...@domain.example>
which is syntactically correct and works. If I apply this assumption to what
is displayed during the tests described above, it looks as if the system
takes
fname lname (user...@domain.example)
as the display name and internally appends the email address
user...@domain.example resulting in
fname lname (user...@domain.example) <user...@domain.example>
which is syntactically incorrect and of course does not work.


So far for the lengthy analysis of the symptoms. Any ideas what to do?