square bracket characters in email address

Question

When we receive a MimeMessage which contains recipient InternetAddresses containing square brackets, we get 'javax.mail.internet.AddressException: Local address contains illegal character in string' when we call MimeMessage.getAllRecipients().

The email address below is one example where we get the above exception:

"ABC NAME-DEM-SAST1" <ABCNAME-DEM-SAST1[001-SAST1@domain.com]>

Is the above example address an actual valid email address? And if it is, why can't an InternetAddress be created from it?

e.g. InternetAddress add = new InternetAddress("\"ABC NAME-DEM-SAST1\" <ABCNAME-DEM-SAST1[001-SAST1@domain.com]>", false);

I had a look at Javamail problem with ñ characters in mail addresses question for an answer but to no avail.

I am using javamail 1.4 and JVM is running on a Linux host system.

Any insight on this issue would be much appreciated!

Regards, PM.

Answer 1

This explanation indicates that "[" and "]" are invalid characters in an email address, except if used to bound a domain literal (e.g. [192.1.0.0]). If the example address should show a name and the corresponding address, a correct syntax would be

"ABC NAME-DEM-SAST1" <001-SAST1@domain.com>

Square brackets are used by Microsoft Office to mark one-off addresses ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc842281.aspx ), but that seems to be non-standardized and also does not match the given example.

The email address RFC.