CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We imported a large dataset of contacts for a mailout recently, and one of those addresses contained an ampersand (which I'm pretty sure is not the RFC goodness). However, it imported into CiviCRM 2.0 fine - must have sneaked past the email address validation somehow.

Maybe it's valid. Anyway, when we did our mailout, CiviMail hung 2/3 of the way through, because each attempt to send the email would fail:
2008-05-05 18:08:36 H=mail.mydmain.xyz (localhost) [x.x.x.x] F=<bounce.1.68.5651.ff0bc975409b86b4254299902def6a7992d29562-abc&def=xtra.co.nz@mydomain.xyz> rejected RCPT <abc&def@xtra.co.nz>: restricted characters in address
2008-05-05 18:10:03 H=mail.mydomain.xyz (localhost) [x.x.x.x] F=<bounce.1.68.5651.ff0bc975409b86b4254299902def6a7992d29562-abc&def=xtra.co.nz@mydomain.xyz> rejected RCPT <abc&def@xtra.co.nz>: restricted characters in address

So there are two potential issues here:

1. CiviCRM perhaps should have rejected that email on import
2. CiviMail apparently can be blocked by queuing an address which is not acceptable to the mailserver (Exim in our case)

The fix (for me) was to correct the contact's email address; on the next queue run, CiviMail continued processing the queue.

All,

Just an FYI regarding 'non-standard' characters and email. The Apostrophe (') is not (as far as I have been able to ascertain) an official non-standard character in email. This is despite it royally buggering SQL statements in code (it's interpreted as a closing quote) or potentially causing hiccups in PHP.

What I have direct personal experience of in my workplace and in a few voluntary organisations that I'm a member of is that certain names in certain nationalities/ethnic groups VALIDLY use aposotrophes and some enterprise level email servers (e.g. Microsoft Exchange) allow the use of apostrophes in names... e.g. daragho'brien@domain.com.

This has caused problems for other OpenSource tools I've used, in particular Joomla/Joomalopolis's Community Builder. My understanding of a workaround that was used for that Opensource tool was to ensure that 'non-standard' characters such as apostrophes or ampersands were escaped out in the string 'behind the scenes' so they weren't interpreted as code but could be reconstructed as 'human-readable' email addresses for presentation purposes.

It's been a while since I looked at that issue so I can't remember the full details of the fix (but it did seem to work).

Note that this was a bug and it has been fixed in CRM-3108. This was mentioned in this forum post:

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,3350.msg14825.html#msg14825

lobo