identifier of the destination where email messages are delivered
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John Doe <[email protected]> โ what do you call the whole thing?
It's called a mailbox, as specified in RFC 5322 on page 45:
3.4. Address Specification
Addresses occur in several message header fields to indicate senders and recipients of messages. An address may either be an individual mailbox, or a group of mailboxes.
Normally, a mailbox is composed of two parts: (1) an optional display name that indicates the name of the recipient (which can be a person or a system) that could be displayed to the user of a mail application, and (2) an addr-spec address enclosed in angle brackets ("<" and ">"). There is an alternate simple form of a mailbox where the addr-spec address appears alone, without the recipient's name or the angle brackets. The Internet addr-spec address is described in section 3.4.1.
Source 3.4. Address Specification
See also Appendix A.1.2. Different Types of Mailboxes
It is in the RFC5322, you just missed it:
address = mailbox / group
mailbox = name-addr / addr-spec
name-addr = [display-name] angle-addr
angle-addr = [CFWS] "<" addr-spec ">" [CFWS] / obs-angle-addr
group = display-name ":" [group-list] ";" [CFWS]
display-name = phrase
mailbox-list = (mailbox *("," mailbox)) / obs-mbox-list
address-list = (address *("," address)) / obs-addr-list
group-list = mailbox-list / CFWS / obs-group-list
Let's break this down.
address either a mailbox or a group. A mailbox is a name-addr or addr-spec.
This name-addr is the format you're asking about: there is an optional display-name (it's optional because it is defined with square brackets) followed by the angle-addr, which itself is an addr-spec in angle brackets with optional foldable space CFWS on both sides of it (defined further in the section 3.2.2), or an obsolete address format obs-angle-addr.
A whole section 3.4.1 is dedicated to the description of addr-spec format.
So, in conclusion:
John Doe <[email protected]>is aname-addr, which is a variant ofmailbox, which is a variant ofaddress.John Doeis adisplay-name<[email protected]>is anangle-addr[email protected]is anaddr-specjohnis alocal-partexample.comis adomain.
I am switching over the company I work for to a new email system. We are switching from a local company that we have used for over 20 years to Googleโs Gmail.
We planned on changing the email address formats from a firstname and first initial of last name format ([email protected]) to a [email protected] โฆ that is until the CEO decided that we needed to discuss it more.
His concerns were privacy, and that the shorter the better because when handing it out, itโs very hard to hand out emails already let alone bigger ones rather than shorter. I understand his views about it, but wanted to see what you all thought about this.
We are going to meet again in 3 days and discuss what way we should go. What are your thoughts on this? What format do you prefer and why? Also if you had a choice of the two I presented what would you prefer and why?