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The local mailbox portion (bit before the "@") of email addresses is case sensitive. In practice, most email providers don't actually honor that, and so in pra
by matthewowen 11y ago
The local mailbox portion (bit before the "@") of email addresses is case sensitive.
In practice, most email providers don't actually honor that, and so in practice it's a bad move. It is technically correct though.
- Vendan 11y agoNote that the local mailbox portion MUST BE treated as case sensitive in the context of the SMTP protocol and such, but it is up to the mail host to actually define the semantics of the local part. Non-case sensitive mailboxes is not prohibited anywhere in the spec, what you are referring to is there to prevent the local portion of the address from being changed when passed through a relay. "the local-part MUST be interpreted and assigned semantics only by the host specified in the domain part of the address."
- stronglikedan 11y agoHmmm...right you are. Thanks. I guess I never thought to look that up. Likely due to the common way being so pervasive. > The local-part of a mailbox MUST BE treated as case sensitive. [0] [0] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt
- MildlySerious 11y agoAs for handling this in the real world, the approach I like best is to store email addresses the way they are entered, but create an index on the lowercase version for lookup and uniqueness checks.
- soft_dev_person 11y agoA lot of people don't really know their own email address, then. When based on their name, they might write both with capitalization and without depending on mood... We lower-case all e-mails in our systems. I'll let you know when we hit a system that actually treats it case-sensitive.