November 14, 2002
Why didn’t you tell me my local part was missing?
After nearly five years of habitually inserting clever nicknames into my email account user name (eg: Grant [Perl Interrupted] Hutchinson), I have had to discontinue the practice. Not that I’ve run out of witty nom de plumage by any means. I place the blame solely on the current state of disheveled and misconfigured email server and client software. I have been witnessing more and more instances of my messages bouncing back with errors such as:
Delivery failed550 rejected: syntax error in ‘From’ header when scanning forsender: missing or malformed local part (expected word or “<“)in “Grant [Faux Finish] Hutchinson <email hidden; JavaScript is required>”
Missing or malformed local part, my sweet aunt fanny. Since when have brackets been considered illegal characters in internet mail header fields? If someone can point this out to me in the standards document, I’ll back off. Damnation. And it’s not the few messages that bounce back that bother me, since I can simply resend those messages using a slightly less embellished user name or another account altogether. What bothers me is how much email never reached its intended party and never notified me that there was an issue because of the way a certain mail server may have been configured. I guess from now on I play it safe and boring, saving my cleverness for other venues.
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