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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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Noisy Bleeping Sheep

It’s 1am and I’m fighting a bout of insomnia. I had a friend years ago who was an insomniac. Sounded great! Stay up all night learn, juggling, and doing. It wasn’t until years later that I learned insomnia doesn’t mean energy. Insomnia can be zombie. Too tired to do anything yet still unable to sleep. That’s pointless because nothing gets done at night nor during the day. I’d rather be awake and alert…all the time. Now where’s my rejuvenation pill that substitutes for a good night’s sleep?

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Grand Central No More

I was fortunate to receive an early invite to Grand Central. Unfortunately, this meant when it became Google Voice, I was stuck with my number unless I paid $10 which is fine because by the time I found out about the $10 I’m sure any number I’d want was taken. I also never took advantage of Grand Central for reasons I won’t get into. I am now very comfortable with Google Voice and am being to direct more of my calls through it.

If you used Grand Central, your old messages have remained available but that ends December 31st.

Dear GrandCentral User (djuggler):

We’re writing to let you know that we will be closing down the GrandCentral website as of December 31, 2009. Get your messages while you can (if you want them).

All GrandCentral accounts were upgraded to Google Voice earlier this year, but since that time, you’ve still been able to log-in to your GrandCentral account and listen to old messages there. You will no longer be able to log-in to your GrandCentral account after December 31. Because of this, we strongly suggest downloading any messages or contacts that you want to keep before December 31.

We suggest you take action now to download any information you want to keep.

– The Google Voice Team

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Brrrrrrr

It’s 69°F (that’s 20.5°C to the rest of the whole) inside the house and probably 10 degrees colder in the basement. That’s with the emergency heat on and the thermostat set to 75"F (23.8°C). I can’t use the woodstove because 1) it needs to be cleaned, 2) Tommy now lives in that room and has piled stuff all over the stove, and 3) I haven’t put the fireboard up on a wall I built near it. That stove used to heat this house in the winter. I really need new windows and to re-insulate the walls and attic.

*temperature conversion by OnlineConversion.com.

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The Magento Headache

I’ve had 3 people ask if I could support Magento, the open source e-commerce application that is the current rage. It is good for midsized businesses. According to today’s reading, small sized operations are better off with a different application as the complexity of customizations and updates on Magento are more costly than a small operation should consider. I can attest that Magento is a pain to configure. What seemed like should have been a quick infusion of data into a database and a simple installation process including a config file or two and this thing should be running. No, never that simple. I allotted two hours today to install and evaluate Magento. Instead, I reached the end of the day with my head throbbing; eyes tired, red and watery; and nerves on edge resulting in an undeserved burst of anger on Noah. I’ve read dozens of tech articles, forums, and blogs, and tried installing Magento on my dev server as well as my shared hosting server. Both simply return a "500 Internal Server Error." I have not exhausted my efforts and still feel I need to know Magento. I will get it installed!

Update: I ran the Magento server check script and found my hosted server at 1and1 meets the requirements for Magento and my development server is lacking one component. Coincidentally, the magento-check.php file produced a 500 Internal Server Error on both the dev server and the hosted server until I renamed the .htaccess to something else. It would appear there is a problem in the .htaccess. This should be easy to troubleshoot now.
Update 2: My error logs indicate "DirectoryIndex not allowed here" The Magento forums suggest altering httpd.conf to have "AllowOverride All"
Update 3: This barebones guide to installing Magento at 1and1 helped.
Update 4: Success! I now have a demo installation of Magento running. This will lead to many good things.