first.last mailboxes ...

[Laurens van Alphen]

> have a client telling me that '.' is perfectly valid in a 
> mailbox, cause
> he can do it @earthlink.net ... I know with Cyrus IMAPd you 
> can't, since
> the '.' denotes a subfolder, but can someone point me to an RFC or
> *something* that states that it is, in fact, not valid?

In fact, a dot is perfectly legal (rfc2822*) and if you use
'unixhierarchysep: yes' in /etc/imapd.conf you *can* use things like
'laurens.van.alphen' as a mailbox name. At least in 2.1.12 we can.

*) See http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html:

addr-spec       =       local-part "@" domain
local-part      =       dot-atom / quoted-string / obs-local-part
dot-atom        =       [CFWS] dot-atom-text [CFWS]
dot-atom-text   =       1*atext *("." 1*atext)

Cheers,

--
Laurens van Alphen
Keen on dots