RFC 3696, "Application Techniques for Checking and Transformation of Names", February 2004

Errata ID: 3563
Status: Verified
Type: Technical
Publication Format(s) : TEXT
Reported By: David Hoerl
Date Reported: 2013-03-22
Verifier Name: Nevil Brownlee
Date Verified: 2014-02-03

Section 3.4 says:

Section 3 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:

Section 3 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
or      
      "Abc@def"@example.com

   is a valid form of an email address.  Blank spaces may also appear,
   as in

      Fred\ Bloggs@example.com
or      
      "Fred Bloggs"@example.com

   The backslash character may also be used to quote itself, e.g.,

      Joe.\\Blow@example.com
or      
      " Joe.\Blow"@example.com

Notes:

Errata 246 is clearly wrong. The author changed the quoting to make it appear backslash quoting was required to use a single backquote. This is totally wrong, and contradicts the RFC text:

"may appear quoted, or in a quoted string".

I tested today with several mailers sending to the google pseudo-alias of first.last+note@gmail.com, where note can be arbitrary text. By testing numerous versions of quoting I was able to see that my corrected text was what appeared in the destination email.

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