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I wish they would just modify the standard to not allow "Look at all these spaces!"@example.com and such. Many email systems already don't accept it (e.g. gmail

I wish they would just modify the standard to not allow "Look at all these spaces!"@example.com and such. Many email systems already don't accept it (e.g. gmail doesn't, probably others but I didn't test) so the actual practical value is small. There's a whole bunch of stuff in there that no one uses and just makes things harder than they need to be. I've been programming for 25 years. I've been reading this same article repeated over and over again for 25 years too. Clearly it's not working.

Avamander 5y ago
It's not working, but not because the standard says you must support a much more lax format. It's not working because some people are writing bad code, that code does not only fail for spaces between quotes. It fails when more than 50% of the world tries to use their native alphabet - when using UTF-8. It's not the standard's fault that people implementing are not following the old adage of implementing standards: "Be strict in what you give, be lenient in what you accept." Considering how there's really not a tremendous amount of variety in what e-mail software people use, it boils down to those maintainers' stubbornness. If you dig trough old mailing list threads and issue tracker tickets, the ossification becomes quite visible.