Why are email addresses always in lower case? I always thought that anything in front of the domain name was NOT case sensitive, is this true? Or am I wrong? Thanks.
It’s not. But what that means is that the server will treat MYEMAIL the same as myemail or MyEmail. You can put the caps wherever helps you remember it better, the server will store it as myemail.
What if the primary SMTP email address is entered with capitalized first letters? Queuing@company.com instead of queuing@company.com?
I think the reason for using lower case in simply that UPPER CASE IS IRRITATING TO READ ALL THE TIME.
The general convention all over the internet is that using capital letters is rude–it’s like shouting at the top of your voice.
which would you rather get a nice happy-brithday message from :
yourgrandmother @ superserver.com or YOURGRANDMOTHER @ SUPERSERVER.COM
The servers will interpret both of those as being identical.
How about emails at a subdomain? mangetout@xyz.company.com could be different from mangetout@XYZ.company.com, couldn’t it?
Nope. I just tried with my university email address; dervorin@DePaRtMeNt.school.ac.uk got delivered with no problems.
Neither of those. My choice would be: YourGrandmother @ SuperServer.com
Using upper case at the beginning of each word makes it much easier to read, especially when the same letter occurs twice in a row, or when consecutive words form words that really aren’t there.
I think you’re right - I was going to say that I thought it might depend on how the traffic was handled, but it looks as though there really isn’t any such thing as case sensitivity in DNS lookups. I know some web servers are case sensitive, so www.company.com/xyz/file.txt might be different from www.company.com/XYZ/File.txt, but that’s a wholly different thing from the way traffic is routed to email servers.
To recap, no version of these questions are case sensitive. e-mails and web addresses all work just fine in whatever case(s) you want to put them in.
I’m always amused when people give me their email addresses and specifically tell me which letters should be capitalized (“it’s johnsmith@fakecorp.com, but make sure you type capital J, lower case o-h-n, capital S, lowercase m-i-t-h”, etc). I usually purposely screw it up just to mess with them.
Not so. Web addresses (or at least folders and files on web servers) can be case sensitive, if the web server is configured that way.
example:
www.gurman.co.uk/test/test.txt
www.gurman.co.uk/test/Test.txt
Domain names themselves aren’t case sensitive, though.
Agh… fouled up my own links… try again; THESE are different:
www.gurman.co.uk/test/test.txt
www.gurman.co.uk/Test/test.txt
Thanks, that is what I thought. It is my understanding that domain names are not case sensitive but anything after them can be, but aren’t necessarily. This seems to be what is being said here. Thanks.
I suppose someone could actually develop a mail server application that was case sensitive, so that Joe@bloggs.com would be different from joe@bloggs.com, but it’s hard to imagine why anyone would bother.
Using the SMTP protocol, which is what is used to transfer email over the internet, the local part of the address (before the @) is case sensitive, but the domain (after the @) is not. This is outlined in RFC 2821, section 2.4. It says:
So technically email addresses are case sensitive, but using this functionality is discouraged to avoid confusion.
A little more email address trivia from that RFC: the maximum local-part length is 64 characters, and the maximum domain length is 255 characters, so the longest email address you can have and still be within spec is 320 characters. Now that would be a hard address to remember or spell out over the phone.