Re: The length of a email address

[Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Pat,

What do you consider to be part of the e-mail address?

For example, is the following an e-mail address?

   Scott Klement (Comment Goes Here) <scott@xxxxxxxxxxx>

How about:

   Scott Klement <scott@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Or, do you just mean this part?

   <scott@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Or just this part?

   scott@xxxxxxxxxxx

In that last case, the length limit would be 320 bytes. Maximum of 64 
bytes before the @, and 255 after the @.   At least, that's what the 
standards say -- but I've seen many situations in e-mail where the 
standards have been ignored, even by major software vendors (such as 
Micro$oft.)

A 320 byte address could not be used in a forward/reverse path, since 
the maximum length of a path is 256 bytes (including punctuation).  I 
wouldn't put much stock in the 256 byte limit, however, since NOBODY 
uses paths these days.  They were popular in the UUCP days, but those 
days are long gone.

If you add the other parts into the address, it can be arbitrarily long. 
There's no length restriction on the display name or comments.  The SMTP 
standards preach a philosophy of taking the length numbers as minimums, 
and endeavoring to write code that does not put a length limitation on 
anything.  (Kinda hard to do in a database, though.)



On 11/7/2011 9:40 AM, Pat Barber wrote:
> I am developing an application that requires that I store a number of
> email addresses.
>
> I have found several articles that discuss the maximum length but I am
> not really
> sure what is the "correct" number.
>
> Is 256 the maximum length for a typical email address ?