Space at the end of an email address in Outlook Express

Can anyone shed any light on an anomaly I have discovered between
different email servers?

If you set up a New Contact in your address book from Outlook Express,
by copying and pasting an email address, and you accidentally copy and
paste a white space at the end of the address, you can send a message
and the header will look like this:

To: "peter spacy"

Now some ISPs' mail-sending programs can handle this, and some can't.

Here are some that deliver the message:
NTL (major UK ISP)
One&One (Schlund/Kundenserver - major European domain host)
O2 (major European mobile phone network which also has email service)

And here are some that bounce back:
GoDaddy (major US domain host using "secureserver.net")
Yahoo
Gmail (Google's mail service)

This is what the bounces look like:
=========================
GoDaddy:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at
smtpout02-04.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following
addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

:
Sorry, I couldn't find any host named nonexistent.freeserve.co.uk.
(#5.1.2)

:
Sorry, I couldn't find any host named anyisp.com?. (#5.1.2)
=====
Note that the second one, which is a real domain with a space, comes
out with a question mark at the end, while the genuinely dead domain
does not.
==================================================
Yahoo:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following
addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

:
Sorry, I couldn't find any host named anyisp.com?. (#5.1.2)
==================================================
Gmail:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

peter@anyisp.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: Parse Error: Illegal To: address (invalid domain name)
========
Note you can't even see the spaces in this bounce.


Can anyone shed any light on this phenomenon?

Re: Space at the end of an email address in Outlook Express

peter.reynolds@gmail.com wrote:

> Can anyone shed any light on an anomaly I have discovered between
> different email servers?
>
> If you set up a New Contact in your address book from Outlook Express,
> by copying and pasting an email address, and you accidentally copy and
> paste a white space at the end of the address, you can send a message
> and the header will look like this:
>
> To: "peter spacy"
>
> Now some ISPs' mail-sending programs can handle this, and some can't.
>
> Here are some that deliver the message:
> NTL (major UK ISP)
> One&One (Schlund/Kundenserver - major European domain host)
> O2 (major European mobile phone network which also has email service)
>
> And here are some that bounce back:
> GoDaddy (major US domain host using "secureserver.net")
> Yahoo
> Gmail (Google's mail service)
>
> This is what the bounces look like:
> =========================
> GoDaddy:
>
> Hi. This is the qmail-send program at
> smtpout02-04.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net.
> I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following
> addresses.
> This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
>
> :
> Sorry, I couldn't find any host named nonexistent.freeserve.co.uk.
> (#5.1.2)
>
> :
> Sorry, I couldn't find any host named anyisp.com?. (#5.1.2)
> =====
> Note that the second one, which is a real domain with a space, comes
> out with a question mark at the end, while the genuinely dead domain
> does not.
> ==================================================
> Yahoo:
>
> Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com.
> I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following
> addresses.
> This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
>
> :
> Sorry, I couldn't find any host named anyisp.com?. (#5.1.2)
> ==================================================
> Gmail:
>
> This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
>
> Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
>
> peter@anyisp.com
>
> Technical details of permanent failure:
> PERM_FAILURE: Parse Error: Illegal To: address (invalid domain name)
> ========
> Note you can't even see the spaces in this bounce.
>
>
> Can anyone shed any light on this phenomenon?
>

The reason the question mark appears is that the character after the
..com is not really a space but a different character such as a tab, or
line feed character, or something else. I believe that when you copy
and paste, you might be hilighting more then you think.

To solve this, copy and paste, use the builtin function of adding the
sender/recipient of an email message to your address book. Let the
application which reformats the message with the HTML tags in the header
deal with the data.

AK

Re: Space at the end of an email address in Outlook Express

No, it's really and truly just a space. I just put several spaces in
in Textpad and only copied the email address and one space, just to
make sure.

And when I got the bounce, I copied the header into Textpad and did
View, Visible Spaces, and it is just a space when it comes back in the
bounce too.

Re: Space at the end of an email address in Outlook Express

peter.reynolds@gmail.com wrote:

> No, it's really and truly just a space. I just put several spaces in
> in Textpad and only copied the email address and one space, just to
> make sure.
>
> And when I got the bounce, I copied the header into Textpad and did
> View, Visible Spaces, and it is just a space when it comes back in the
> bounce too.
>

Peter,

Copying and pasting is what got you to this place in the first place.
What makes you think that copying the entry from the email and pasting
it into notepad does not modify the entry. Could the entry be furher
altered by the email client used? In a sense can you view the raw
message on the server? This could also be an issue with the email
client used that instead of stripping the space it encodes it. Your
best bet is to stop copying and pasting but to use the builtin function
to add email addresses to the address book, or to make sure that there
are no "space" included in the email address when you add it.

AK

Re: Space at the end of an email address in Outlook Express

wrote in message
news:1123076896.631068.58260@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

> Can anyone shed any light on an anomaly I have discovered between
> different email servers?
>
> If you set up a New Contact in your address book from Outlook Express,
> by copying and pasting an email address, and you accidentally copy and
> paste a white space at the end of the address, you can send a message
> and the header will look like this:
....
> Can anyone shed any light on this phenomenon?

Yes, don't put spaces there.