Is there a maximum email address size? 1

[abacuscorp]

Good day:

I have a need to set up a fixed length field to hold an email address. How big can they be? I've seen some AS/400 programs that used 50 characters. Is this the maximum, or was someone just guessing? Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you

Warren

 

[sleipnir214]

Section 4.3.5.1 of RFC 2821 states that the maximum length of any SMTP command is 512 bytes, including the CRLF at the end of the command.

Since an recipient's address is specified by the "RCPT TO:" command:

RCPT TO: <foo@bar.baz>CRLF

So theoretically the maximum length of an SMTP address if probably 499 bytes.

Practically, I've never seen an address longer than 75 characters and very few longer than 50.




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[foxdev]

Excellent answer, sleipnir214.

As he said, most email addresses are well under 75 characters. I just did an analysis of 3,200 of our customer email addresses, and the longest was 41.

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