New email format?

[Mamochan]

I received a email to the following (modified to maintain anonymity) email address
support%randomconferencing...com

has anyone else seen % replacing @? that and I am pretty sure ...com is invalid dns.

I am scratching my head on how it actually got to me!

[Crossbow]

New one on me. I've never seen that.

[It's me]

Nope, not valid:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address

Probably the person manually altered the email address so a person could figure it out, but an email harvester program would get stuck.

[Mamochan]

The catch is that is the email that is in the headers that the webservers processed..

That was in the TO field....

[Geek King]

The catch is that is the email that is in the headers that the webservers processed..

That was in the TO field....

Those can be spoofed, from what I understand. Probably a spammer or a scammer sending the email. There are ways to find the real address, but I've never looked really hard at doing it.

[Mamochan]

IT was a real end user. so it was not a spoofing attempt or anything like that. It really seems that the enduser emailed to that address...

[Captain Trips]

I just recently helped a user with a similar problem - and found the cause to be what was in the contact record's "Display Name" field - and that one can take special characters. Perhaps that's what's going on here?

[rose_metal_nz]

I just recently helped a user with a similar problem - and found the cause to be what was in the contact record's "Display Name" field - and that one can take special characters. Perhaps that's what's going on here?

That's what I was thinking of, too!

[ender]

When an e-mail is sent, the sender's and recipient's address is usually sent in two places - first in the conversation between the e-mail servers (this is called the envelope), and then again in the message headers - but the servers only care about the first (envelope) part, so it's not unusual to see completely different addresses (or even no addresses at all) in the e-mail program than what was actually used to send.

Some e-mail servers will add the envelope addresses to the message headers, but this doesn't always happen, and even when it does, you have to look at the headers specifically to see them (since these headers aren't standardized).

Also, the part before @ in e-mail address can contain almost anything, and be still valid, which is something that many validation scripts don't understand (something like /#&|@example.net is a valid e-mail address).