Category: Communications

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Maximum length of an email address is 254 characters, not 320

I work in a business of constant learning. Technology is continually evolving and being revised. Somethings are rather constant but, being human, weI tend to develop habits occasionally rooted in wrong assumptions. Perhaps a deadline forced a decision without having time to look up the specification and over time, our mind took that unresearched decision as fact. I’ve made numerous databases over the years based upon just such a wrong assumption. My error has been in the acceptable maximum length of an email address. My number is irrelevant but I am in good company with being incorrect on the length of an email address as many people mistakenly believe it to be 320 characters.

An RFC is a request for comments which "is a memorandum published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems." (Wikipedia) RFCs set the standards that define how the Internet works. RFC3696 and RFC5321 explain that the maximum length of an email address is 254 characters.

There appears to be some confusion over the maximum valid email address size. Most people believe it to be 320 characters (64 characters for the username + 255 characters for the domain + 1 character for the @ symbol). Other sources suggest 129 (64 + 1 + 64) or 384 (128+1+255, assuming the username doubles in length in the future).

This confusion means you should heed the ‘robustness principle’ ("developers should carefully write software that adheres closely to extant RFCs but accept and parse input from peers that might not be consistent with those RFCs." – Wikipedia) when writing software that deals with email addresses. Furthermore, some software may be crippled by naive assumptions, e.g. thinking that 50 characters is adequate (examples). Your 200 character email address may be technically valid but that will not help you if most websites or applications reject it.

The actual maximum email length is currently 254 characters:

"The original version of RFC 3696 did indeed say 320 was the maximum length, but John Klensin (ICANN) subsequently accepted this was wrong."

"This arises from the simple arithmetic of maximum length of a domain (255 characters) + maximum length of a mailbox (64 characters) + the @ symbol = 320 characters. Wrong. This canard is actually documented in the original version of RFC3696. It was corrected in the errata. There’s actually a restriction from RFC5321 on the path element of an SMTP transaction of 256 characters. But this includes angled brackets around the email address, so the maximum length of an email address is 254 characters." – Dominic Sayers

[Source, EPH, Email Address Length FAQ]

Every day I learn something new! (even when I should have known it for a couple of decades)

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We used to call it The Internet…now it’s just Google

We’ve been living in the Wild West of The Internet. The Internet used to mean Gopher, Veronica, Archie, Usenet, MUDs, IRC (Fall ’88), and telnet, none of which used a graphical interface. Everything was done from the command line, UNIX’s equivalent of the DOS prompt. Today my children, as most people, live on a tamer Internet and feel that The Internet is something you look at with Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. Chrome users know better. In the past, using a search engine did not mean using Google. Google. How about that Google? Google is doing so well that we have started to aggregate all our services into Google. I know I have. I use GMail, Google Voice, Google Wave, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and so on. All my data is slowly finding its way to a single company, one which I don’t control. That should scare the pants off of us!

In today’s world of collaboration and information sharing, url shorteners are all the rage. A URL shortener takes a long web address and shortens it to as few characters as possible for sending in SMS messages or making the address easier for someone to type. Bit.ly is the forerunner having secured the default url shortener position with Twitter and Seesmic. 3.ly is my favorite. Despite being essential tools, Dave Winer makes a good argument for why these URL shorteners are bad for the Internet and offers a fix to their inherent problem. The concept of a URL shortener is simple. You could make your own URL shortening service and WordPress users could make a URL shortener plugin. If you made your own, you’d be in control of your data; a principle I highly encourage despite housing so much of myself in The Cloud.

Today, Google enters the URL shortening scene with http://goo.gl/ Expect this to take off. Expect some struggling shortening services to close doors causing waves of link rot across the Internet. As Google consumes another popular activity, url shortening, do we take one more step to losing The Internet to The Google in the way that online activity prior to The Internet used to be known as CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL? In 5 years, will there still be An Internet or will we simply connect to The Google?

Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:

  • Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
  • Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
  • Speed – fast resolution of short URLs

Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.

The Google privacy policy applies to the Google URL Shortener. Please note that Google may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.

Update: Interestingly enough, yesterday, Bit.ly announced Bit.ly Pro, a service to use Bit.ly’s software but with your own domain name. Take note, this is still giving your data to a 3rd party (The Cloud) but it is a proven service, with a system with very interesting feedback (statistics), and probably far more scalable than something you could build from scratch. Dave Winer revisits his concerns with Bit.ly in Build to Flip?.

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I have phone again – sorta

My replacement phone for my antique Motorola v3xx RAZR arrived today. Now I have an LG CF360 which looks and acts a whole lot like a Samsung A777. I lost everything! Every contact. Every picture. Every voice recording. Every shortcut in my life. Gone! My contacts in my phone had notes related to the contact, birthdays, private numbers, people I only talk to once in a blue moon and do so because I see (saw) them in my contact list and more.

So be it! Call this a new beginning. Let the burdens that accumulated in that phone be gone! We start anew today. If you call and get my voicemail, be sure to leave your phone number. Thanks.

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Incommunicado

My phone has died. If you are trying to SMS me or call me, I am not receiving your messages. Please contact me through Twitter, Skype (djuggler), or Cathy. You can try my Google Voice number 865-686-8693.

If you have the next killer iPhone app idea that could make you millions, I’ll happily build the app for you in exchange for a MacBook Pro and an iPhone (say, $5000).

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My affair with Jott

I was amazed with Jott when it first came out and it quickly became my favorite memory aid, mind declutterer, and to-do list organizer. Jott allows you to speak a message and have it transcribed to your Jott dashboard, Twitter, Remember The Milk, Google Calendar and many more services. It works through a combination of speech recognition and human transcribers. Then the honeymoon ended and Jott brought its free version to a close. I recently deemed this tool important enough to me to sign up again and it has already paid for itself.

I let Jott send me reminders to both SMS and email. Our neighborhood lacks an association so I sent myself a note. This is what Jott sent me in email. (Click the picture for a larger view) Thank you Jott! Shh. Don’t tell Cathy.

jott reminder.egg on Aviaryjott reminder.egg on Aviary.

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Google Wave Invites and Reciprocation

Wow! Mention "Google Wave invite" er…nomination or simply "I have a Google Wave account" and you have friends coming out of the woodwork that you never knew you had! Actually that word friend is fuzzy in meaning to me in this new age of social networking. I mean, most of the people who have begged me for an invitation to Google Wave are people I’ve never heard of. And not one, not one!, has offered me so much as a steak dinner in exchange for the invite…er, nomination. People! These things are going for $80 on eBay.

So who should get the 8 invites that came with my account? Well.. no one else because I’ve given all mine out. But who should have received them? My clients. See, Google Wave is about collaboration. At least that is my take on it. So, to get an invite from me, you should have said, "Doug, I know you have PHP and CF skills. Hook me up on Google Wave and let’s run a small project through this together." That’s call equitable plus it uses the tool as is designed. Instead I feel like I’ve largely been approached by strangers wanting to declare "I have a Google Wave account before anyone else. My penis is large!"

Now let’s talk about these invites Unlike GMail where Google genuinely offered invitations that allowed me to instantly bring someone else into the project, Google Wave is offering nominations. (Btw, I still have 99 invitations to GMail if anyone needs one and those are free!) If a nomination is truly a nomination, then the more of these that you get, the faster you will get to the front of the line. If you want to test this theory and have invitations available, contact my wife @cathymccaughan and send her an invite..er, nomination, and let’s drive her to the front of the line. I have seen no documentation that indicates 10 invites..er, nominations, will get you to the line faster than one but it seems sensible to me. We could start a Wave about this but you’ll need an invite..er, nomination first.

Who got my invites? My invitations went out to friends, family and clients with whom I may actually collaborate. If you didn’t get one, that means 1) that maybe I added you to my nomination list and your invite just hasn’t gone out yet or 2) I simply ran out of invites..er, nominations before I got to you. My apologies.

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Prevent Compatibility View

Internet Explorer 8 introduced a button beside the address bar that looks like a rectangle with a break through its middle. If you click it, Internet Explorer reports, "Compatibility View on" but the button does not clearly indicate if compatibility view is on or off. Compatibility view is Internet Explorer 8 pretending to be Internet Explorer 7. To prevent your website visitors from clicking this button, simply make it go away:

Include either the following meta element (which in invalid in HTML5) on your page <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge"> (before any script elements!) or set the following HTTP header on your page: X-UA-Compatible: IE=Edge

[Source, hsivonen.iki.fi, Activating Browser Modes with Doctype]

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Browser Testing

Yea there was Gopher and it was good.
Lo and behold, Mosaic!
And it was slow.
Veronica, Gopher, and I were the hare to the Mosaic tortoise.
But Mosaic was pretty.
And Netscape Navigator became standard.
Microsoft saw Mosaic was good and, like Netscape, based Internet Explorer upon Mosaic’s code.
But Microsoft was evil and the world loved Netscape.
Programmers knew code must work in Netscape and then maybe in Internet Explorer.
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3 for W3C standards were good, and CSS was good, as long as Microsoft could have some of their own proprietary "standards."
Still Netscape dominated.
Enter Internet Explorer 4 and Browser War I was lost.
Now we tested for first for IE3, IE4, and then Netscape Navigator.
Internet Explorer 5 – meh.
Quirks mode – blah.
WML? No one will ever browse with their phone. WAP!
Internet Explorer 6 – WTH!
Opera.
Mosaic beget Navigator beget Mozilla.
And geeks professed the end of Microsoft while normal people replied, "Firewhat?"
Internet Explorer 7 -FTW.
Now we tested for Internet Explorer at least version 7 and 6, Mozilla/Firefox, and maybe Navigator.
Oh, don’t forget to test with JavaScript enabled and disabled, delete your cookies, clear your cache but be ready to explain this to your end users, and don’t forget the magic reboot.
Internet Explorer 8 – is great?
Be sure to include conditional code for a special IE6 cascading style sheet.
What is Flock?
What is compatibility mode?
All hail Google’s Chrome!
What do you mean? Regular people use Macintosh computers!
Apple has a browser? Safari!
Browser War II.
The website looks different on your phone than your computer?
When you say your Internet enabled toaster prints the New York Times fine but my blog burns your toast, is all the bread blackened or just the crust?
And my website does not control the spooling on your Internet enabled toilet paper dispenser.
And if the ink is smearing on your butt, that just means you are wiping before reading the paper.

What is browser compatibility? Testing against this list.

Today I have a website that looks good in Internet Explorer 6, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8. I have not been able to test it in Internet Explorer 7 but will be fixing that today. However, if I put Internet Explorer 8 into "compatibility view," my horizontal list based css driven navigation menu breaks. IE8 Compatibility Mode and IE7 are NOT the same thing! There are many differences between IE8 compatibility view and IE7. So today I’m playing with Internet Explorer’s Virtual Compatibility images.

Interesting, this browser history appeared in my feed today after I posted this.

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Dave Winer Hits One Home

From the beginning I’ve described social media (mostly under the guise of Twitter) as a large party. You enter the scene. You hear a lot of noise. You focus on some conversations and it gets exciting. You still hear a lot of noise. You make some friends. You bond. You make some people angry with flippant remarks. You lose some friends. You shout at the crowd. Everyone talks about you. You step off your soapbox and rejoin the conversation. Everyone forgets you. You step out of the room to go to the bathroom. When you return, you find the conversation continued without you. You try to get people to tell you what you missed. Eventually you figure out you just have to pickup where you left off. You learn that you cannot follow everyone in the room. You realize that even though you aren’t following everyone in the room some of those people are still listening to you. Some people get to stand on the stage and everyone follows them. You think it is unfair that you aren’t on the stage. You meet some of the right people but still aren’t lucky enough to get on the stage. You don’t understand. You resent the people on the stage. You decide to ignore them. The conversation goes on. Eventually you follow the people on the stage again because everyone else is talking about what they said. The conversation goes on. Eventually we all return home.

Dave Winer, you know, the guy who brought us RSS, explains here.

So what is, what was, FriendFeed? Let’s say FriendFeed was that room at the party were the people who started the party hung out and other party goers would look in the room and see that it was different but couldn’t really grasp if it was different good or different bad and most would never really enter that room. In the words of Eric Rice, "the punk rock indie era is over." Facebook bought FriendFeed today. I won’t comment further but to say I agree with Think Jose that Facebook bought the staff, not the software. But this was about Dave Winer’s post to Robert Scoble.

Btw, you should follow me on Twitter here.

ps. Not great words of assurance:

What does this mean for my FriendFeed account?
FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. [Source, FriendFeed Blog, FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request]

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Who quit following you on Twitter? (followup)

Ever wish there was an easy way to see who quit following you on Twitter? Twitterless (see @tless) and Qwitter were two early services to alert when someone quit following you. Both ran into problems when Twitter increased limits on the API. Fortunately Twitterless has rebounded and seems to be working great! Sometimes I contact the people who quit following and have found they did so by accident. It’s a fantastic way to stay in touch with your community. Unfortunately, Qwitter isn’t working for me. I do not know why.

Today I learned @followermonitor has joined the unfollower alert services. I will compare its results to Twitterless and followup later.

Follow me on Twitter @djuggler by clicking here.

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Go green! Give your old iPhone to someone.

All the cool kids are upgrading to the newest iPhone. I remember the day I purchased my gold Motorola RAZR v3xx. Ah! I was ahead of the game with the newest and slickest cellphone on the block. That’s the phone I’m still using. So as you excitedly unbox that new iPhone and relegate your old iPhone to the back of your desk drawer, think about how your e-waste could help free someone from the confines of WAP and instead help them join the hordes enslaved to JOBs. Give me your old iPhone! I mean, find someone in need of an upgrade and let your e-waste become e-useful.