Quotation marks in email address

[Eustace]

When I write an email to a particular person in my address book, the
email appears in the To: field as "abcde4"@xyz.com, with quotation marks
around the name. It's the only email the creates this phenomenon. Why?

emf

--
It ain't THAT, babe! - A radical reinterpretation
https://files.nyu.edu/emf202/public/bd/itaintmebabe.html

[Pete Holsberg]

Eustace has written on 12/15/2010 3:53 PM:

> When I write an email to a particular person in my address book, the
> email appears in the To: field as "abcde4"@xyz.com, with quotation marks
> around the name. It's the only email the creates this phenomenon. Why?
>
> emf

What is in that addressbook card for "First", "Last", "Display" and
"Nickname"?

--
Pete Holsberg
Columbus, NJ

For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and
wrong.
-- H L Mencken

[David E. Ross]

On 12/15/10 12:53 PM, Eustace wrote:
> When I write an email to a particular person in my address book, the
> email appears in the To: field as "abcde4"@xyz.com, with quotation marks
> around the name. It's the only email the creates this phenomenon. Why?
>
> emf
>

The standard form of an E-mail address (per RFC 5322, but not using the
syntax from that RFC) is:
display-name <mail-box@domain>

The display-name for this reply is "David E. Ross". It is optional.
Quotes are not needed, but my very old E-mail client adds them when
adding a new entry to my address book. At one time, the display-name
was bracketed with parentheses; and E-mail clients today should still
recognize that markup. If the display-name is omitted, the < and >
braketing the mail-box@domain may be omitted.

The mail-box is the part of the E-mail address that identifies the
recipient for the destination mail server. For this reply, the mail-box
is nobody.

The domain is the domain of the destination mail server. For this
reply, the domain is nowwhere.invalid.

RFC 5322 specifies other forms of E-mail addresses, primarily for use
where the sender and recipient are both using the same server or are
sending messages through an intranet WAN.

I did not read RFC 5322 thoroughly. Perhaps it requires quotes
bracketing mail-box (as you indicate) when mail-box contains a blank or
certain special characters. Thus, you might see "abcd e4"@xyz.com.
What appears to be a blank in this example might instead be a special,
non-displaying character that causes a white space in displays. It's
even possible that "abcde4" in your example might have a special,
non-displaying character that does not cause a white space in the
display. You might try to view your address book in a hex editor to see
if there is such a character.

--

David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

On occasion, I might filter and ignore all newsgroup messages
posted through GoogleGroups via Google's G2/1.0 user agent
because of spam from that source.

[Eustace]

I had suspected that the "mail-box" might contain special characters
because the email came from Greece, so I had retyped it but the
quotations had reappeared as before. So I downloaded HxD and pasted the
email in it, but it did not accept because it said it contained special
characters.

So I pasted the email address in the Notebook, saved it as text file,
then copied it from there into the Address Book card, and the problem
was solved. I do not expect any future problems, since it contained,
visually, only Latin characters and originated from an American University.

Thanks,