Published RFCs never change. Although every published RFC has been submitted to careful proofreading by the RFC Editor and the author (s), errors do sometimes go undetected. As a service to the readers of RFCs, this page contains a list of technical and editorial errors that have been reported to the RFC Editor and verified by the authors or the IESG.
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Erratum for RFC 3696
Reported By: John C. Klensin; klensin@jck.com
Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2005 17:17:34 -0400
In Section 3, it says:
The exact rule is that any ASCII character, including control
characters, may appear quoted, or in a quoted string. When quoting
is needed, the backslash character is used to quote the following
character. For example
Abc\@def@example.com
is a valid form of an email address. Blank spaces may also appear,
as in
Fred\ Bloggs@example.com
The backslash character may also be used to quote itself, e.g.,
Joe.\\Blow@example.com
It should say:
The exact rule is that any ASCII character, including control
characters, may appear quoted, or in a quoted string. When quoting
is needed, the backslash character is used to quote the following
character. For example
"Abc\@def"@example.com
is a valid form of an email address. Blank spaces may also appear,
as in
"Fred\ Bloggs"@example.com
The backslash character may also be used to quote itself, e.g.,
"Joe.\\Blow"@example.com
In the last paragraph of Section 3, it says:
In addition to restrictions on syntax, there is a length limit on
email addresses. That limit is a maximum of 64 characters (octets)
in the "local part" (before the "@") and a maximum of 255 characters
(octets) in the domain part (after the "@") for a total length of 320
characters. Systems that handle email should be prepared to process
addresses which are that long, even though they are rarely
encountered.
It should say:
In addition to restrictions on syntax, there is a length limit on
email addresses. That limit is a maximum of 64 characters (octets)
in the "local part" (before the "@") and a maximum of 255 characters
(octets) in the domain part (after the "@") for a total length of 320
characters. However, there is a restriction in RFC 2821 on the length of an
address in MAIL and RCPT commands of 256 characters. Since addresses
that do not fit in those fields are not normally useful, the upper
limit on address lengths should normally be considered to be 256.