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In a web based+REST api system, I want people to enter their email address along a password they choose to authenticate to my service (pretty common practice, nothing new),

My question is, is it ok if I lower case them and remove any dot (.) before the @ sign?

To make it even more clear, "ali@example.com" and "a.li@ExamPle.Com" will be the same user.
So part of this question will be, are there email services out there that are sensitive to dots in your email and you will not receive your email if they are send to the dot less version? Gmail ignores the dots as far as I know.

Ali
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1 Answers1

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According to RFC 3696, the period is a valid email character:

Contemporary email addresses consist of a "local part" separated from a "domain part" (a fully-qualified domain name) by an at-sign ("@").

[…]

Without quotes, local-parts may consist of any combination of
alphabetic characters, digits, or any of the special characters

  ! # $ % & ' * + - / = ?  ^ _ ` . { | } ~

period (".") may also appear, but may not be used to start or end the local part, nor may two or more consecutive periods appear.

Edit: To provide some more information, it looks like Exchange doesn't ignore the period in email addresses (firstname.lastname@myprovider.com worked, whereas firstnamelastname@myprovider.com resulted in a Delivery Status Notification (Failure)).

Community
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Paul Mougel
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