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Salesforce Email Address Format Technical Standards Validation

Fecha de publicación: Feb 14, 2025
Descripción

Note: Information in this article applies to both Classic and Lightning Experience

RFC or "Request for Comments" refers to a set of technical standards that define the rules for email formatting and transmission.  RFC standards govern the structure of an email address and its headers, ensuring compatibility between different email systems across the internet.

Salesforce makes every attempt to conform to the latest RFCs related to email. As with most providers, there are some areas where we stray from these specifications, though in the majority of use cases it does not generally impact customers’ ability to send to specific addresses.

The following are some high level guidelines that cover what we support concerning content and formatting of email addresses as well as some places where we don’t fully meet the expectations of current RFCs.
 

Solución
 
Supported email format notes:
 
  • Allowed Characters: We support the full range of characters as documented in the RFCs. We also have provided support for Email Address Internationalization (EAI) which allows use of non-Latin based characters in email addresses. See https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.emailadmin_eai_set_up.htm&type=5
  • Maximum Size of an address: Per RFCs, an email address can be 256 characters in length. Most email address fields in Salesforce are currently limited to 80 characters. This is generally large enough to cover most email addresses. See RFC 5321 Section 4.5.3.1.3
  • Addresses are stored as lower case in Salesforce. The RFC is somewhat ambiguous in this regard in that it says the local-part MAY be case-sensitive, it then says mail receivers SHOULD avoid creating mailboxes that are case sensitive. In practice - we have not found conversion to lower case to cause any delivery issues.
  • Consecutive period characters ('..') are allowed in the middle and at the end of the local part of the email address (eg, a..a@test.jp and a..@test.jp ) but not at the beginning of the local part (eg, .a@test.jp). This violates what the RFC says but was specifically requested many years ago by our customers in Japan due to the practices of providers there. There are other providers that also accept such address though they may just ignore the “..”.
  • Comments - denoted by matched parentheses - are allowed in the domain as well as in the local-part. Comments in an email address are not shown when viewing the address and are ignored when sending email; for example, john.doe@(comment)example.com, and john.doe@example.com(comment) are both equivalent to john.doe@example.com.
  • Gray areas - The spec itself has a lot of gray areas (such as things marked obsolete but still kept in the spec). We are likely out of compliance with regard to comments in addresses, and likely we're not fully compliant with quoted local parts. Both of these are less used features and we don't get a lot of issues that come to us on these.
  • If you find that specific addresses are a problem, please report issues to support.


Please note that there is no regex or sample code that we can provide that covers our edits for email addresses.

Additional information:
Número del artículo de conocimiento

000384328

 
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