How sensitive is your email address?
This particular feed on New York Times Technology caught my attention, so much that I actually loaded the page to read the story:
The domain-name portion of the e-mail address - the part after the @ sign is not case-sensitive, but the first part of the address may need to be typed in exactly as given. This rule is explained in RFC 2821, the document laying out Internet e-mail standards, found at http://faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2821.html. Even though the first part of the e-mail address is supposed to be case-sensitive, many Internet service providers don’t bother to enforce the rule..
Woah, this is news to me. I always thought that both sides of the “@” symbol were case insensitive, and not just the domain address.
The RFC2821 states specifically:
The local-part of a mailbox MUST BE treated as case sensitive. Therefore, SMTP implementations MUST take care to preserve the case of mailbox local-parts. Mailbox domains are not case sensitive. In particular, for some hosts the user “smith” is different from the user “Smith”. However, exploiting the case sensitivity of mailbox local-parts impedes interoperability and is discouraged.
Aha!
My guess, if the Internet Service Providers woke up to this one and did enforce the rule, I am sure would cause chaos BIG TIME.
Sep 1, 05 at 13:02