Had a strange problem this morning. I noticed that one of our customers had a lot of outbound mail stacking up in their mailbox. To cut a long story short, I finally tracked it down to one of the e-mails which was waiting to go out. One of the users had received an e-mail from someone and clicked Reply to All on it, but their SMTP server was rejecting it with an error about malformed addresses. The e-mail which had been sent to the user had a lot of other recipients on it, and for some reason their addresses were showing up on the e-mail in this format:
and their SMTP server was rejecting it because of the single-quotes (or apostrophes) in the second part of the address. The problem with this e-mail was actually preventing all other outbound e-mails from being sent.
Does anyone know what causes the addresses to come through like this? The sender is using Exchange as their mail server - is it likely to be their server?
at my company we are facing more and more of this issue from mails that we receive from external companies which are using Exchange. I have contacted one company to check with them the issue and below is what their mail admin has told me.
The original mail already contained the accents. Still they got delivered correctly. But when the notes users replies to it sometimes it goes through or otherwise it blocks up your mail queue. It happens only on replies to mails. You can’t simulate it with a new memo because Notes refuses the mails then because of the bad character.
The only solution for us at the moment is to edit those mails in the queue, remove the accents and save it. Then the mail will get processed.
We are thinking of using our new content filtering software to detect <’ and '> and removing then the accents.
Hope this has helped you a bit in understanding the problem. Rgds, Phuoc.
Explanation of exchange admin:
Generally we use e-mail address without accent ('), but this is not rule. When Outlook receives e-mail from unknown recipient it uses in “Smart tag” address in accent if the name preamble is absent: ‘name@domain.domain’ name@domain.domain
So, someone who receives those messages can copy e-mail address from form and paste for using in mail. These explain how accent appeared in address.
When user paste address from saved in memory it appeared in field To as <‘name@domain.domain’>, but in smtp session uses name@domain.domain. I think this is the system reaction on wrong e-mail.