Microsoft KB Archive/820868

Knowledge Base

Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003 do not recognize a comma as an e-mail address separator

Article ID: 820868

Article Last Modified on 3/1/2007

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APPLIES TO

• Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
• Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
• Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager

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SYMPTOMS

If one of the following situations are true

• You click a mailto hyperlink on a Web page that contains multiple e-mail addresses that are separated by a comma (,).
• You click a mailto hyperlink in an HTML formatted e-mail message that contains multiple e-mail addresses that are separated by a comma.

you may receive the following error message when you try to send the e-mail message

Microsoft Outlook doesn't recognize
"E-Mail_address1,E-Mail_address2,...,E-Mail_addressN"
If you used a comma to separate several addresses: click Cancel, change the commas to semicolons, and try to send again.
Would you like to:
Create a new address for "E-Mail_address1,E-Mail_address2,...,E-Mail_addressN"?
Change to:This may list some suggestions to replace the e-mail addresses with. Generally, this is empty and no suggestions are present.

where E-Mail_address1, E-Mail_address2, and E-Mail_addressN are the multiple e-mail addresses that are separated by commas in the mailto hyperlink that you clicked.

CAUSE

This problem occurs because, by default, Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 and Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 do not recognize the comma as an e-mail address separator.

RESOLUTION

Follow these steps to configure Outlook to recognize the comma as a valid e-mail address separator:

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. Click E-Mail Options, and then click Advanced E-Mail Options.
3. Under When sending a message, click to select the Allow comma as address separator check box.

Note You can use a semi-colon (;) to separate e-mail addresses when you click to select the Allow comma as address separator check box.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

Additional query words: OL11 OL2003 RFC 2368 email OL2007

Keywords: kbconfig kbprb kberrmsg kbnofix KB820868

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