Thanks to Walker for pointing me to this O’Reilly Network article on How to Validate an E-mail Address which contains the following tidbit:
“Yes, e-mail addresses can contain comments. I tested them too – and they work. A comment is (to the best of my knowledge) any text placed in parentheses anywhere in the email address. For example, my e-mail can be:
* kevin@kbedell.com, or
* kev(you da man!)in@kbedell.com, or
All these work – I tried them.”
Caveat: Don’t assume, however, that the comment is necessarily private, should you have the burning desire to list your boss in your contact list as, e.g., “john(that_fool)@company.com“, or something even less printable in a family medium. Walker cautions that the comment may be appended to the email address when mail is sent. (David, thanks, how did you know I’d be tempted?) Addendum: when I set up “mailto” URLs for the commented email addresses and click on them in my browser, the comment is extracted and prepended to the email address in the “To:” line. For example, “mailto:john(that_fool)@company.com” would become “To: that_fool john@company.com”.
